Michael Diehl, Laziness
Contributor Notes, Issue #30
J.S. Absher (www.js-absher-poetry.com ) is a poet and independent scholar. His fourth book of poetry, Skating Rough Ground, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. His work has won awards from the NC Poetry Society, BYU Studies Quarterly, and the journal Dialogue, and has been nominated for three Pushcart prizes.
Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal: Born in Mexico, Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Escape Into Life, Kendra Steiner Editions, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press in 2021.
Mela Blust is a Pushcart Prize and three time Best of the Net nominee, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander, Rust+Moth, The Nassau Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Collective Unrest, and many more. Her debut poetry collection, Skeleton Parade, is available with Apep Publications, and her full length collection, They Found a Woman;s Body, is available through Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Mela is a contributing editor for Barren Magazine and can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.
Pushcart Prize Nominee, Dale Champlin, an Oregon poet and artist, has poems in The Opiate, Timberline, Pif, and many other journals. Her press, Just a Lark Books, recently published A Joy to See. Editor of /pãn| dé | mïk/ 2020: An Anthology of Pandemic Poems, Dale has three poetry collections: The Barbie Diaries, Callie Comes of Age, and Isadora. The poems included in this issue of Triggerfish Review are from her yet to be published, illustrated collection, Medusa.
Sue Chenette is the author of Slender Human Weight (Guernica Editions, 2009), The Bones of His Being (Guernica Editions, 2012), Clavier, Paris, Alyssum (Aeolus House, 2020) and the documentary poem What We Said (Motes Books, 2019), based on her time as a social worker during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. A classical pianist, poet, and editor, she grew up in northern Wisconsin and has made her home in Toronto since 1972.
Virna Chessari is an Italian, History and Latin teacher at a high school in Palermo. She is the author of the poetry collection The Ulysses Butterfly La farfalla di Ulisse, Passerino Editore in Italian and English, the novel I Finsword. L’alba dei Purosangue, Capponi Editore and the collection of Fables Il Favolfiore. Favole per crescere, Pietro Vittorietti Editore in Italian.
She has been published in newspapers, magazines (Straylight Magazine, Blue Lake Review, Arba Sicula…) and cultural websites. She has found in English the right notes to express her inner world and her missing words.
Steve Cushman is the author of three novels, including Portisville, winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. He has published two poetry chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book award. A new collection, Eating Paradise Without You, is forthcoming from Unicorn Press in 2023. Cushman lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and works in the IT department at Cone Health.
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.
Darren C. Demaree has had poems have appear, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including Hotel Amerika, Diode, North American Review, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of seventeen poetry collections, most recently ‘clawing at the grounded moon’ (August 2022, April Gloaming). He is the Editor in Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. I am currently living and writing in Columbus, Ohio with my wife and children.
Michael Diehl: photography is a family tradition. Passed down from my grandfather to my father, and then to me, you could say photography is in our blood. We have used this medium to express something dear to us: capturing an image that connects with people. For me, photography is wanting the image to mean something and to take you to that very place in time to experience its beauty for yourself. Find more at my website: madphotostudio.com
Anne Evans writes poetry and fiction. She teaches literature in Englewood, CO. Her short stories have been featured in Relief and the Southern Anthologies, Mad Dogs and Moonshine, and Fireflies in Fruitjars. She has poems published in Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crises and The Book of Matches.
Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College. His work has appeared or, is forthcoming, in Helix, Rabid Oak, Otoliths, Landfill, The Blue Collar Review, Rise Up, Beatnik Cowboy, and elsewhere. His collection Dead Calls and Walk-Ins traces his work as a taxi driver some years ago.
Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella Garofalo fell in love with the English language at six, started writing poems (in Italian) at six and is the author of these books Lo sguardo di Orfeo; L’inverno di vetro; Di altre stelle polari; Casa di erba; Blue Branches; A Blue Soul.
Peter M. Gordon is an award-winning poet with over 100 poems published by poetry journals. He won theThomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize from the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Association of Central Florida and is a founder and current President of Orlando Area Poets. He’s authored two poetry collections and has also published several articles about baseball history through the Society for American Baseball Research. He lives in Orlando, FL and teaches Business of Film in Full Sail University’s Film Production MFA program.
Steve Hatfield: I am an old man now, with a bum knee, a new-found enthusiasm for EPL soccer, and a wonderful woman beside me still. I approach the construction of poems in my golden years with the seriousness of an ex-president in his retirement approaching a canvas with his watercolor brushes. This is how I redeem most of my days.
Andrea Hollander moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for 15 years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for 22. Hollander’s 5th full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her 4th was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her 1st won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction), two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2021 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. In 2017 she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home until the pandemic, when she switched to Zoom. Her website is www.andreahollander.net.
Ben Jeffery is a retired mapping/CS nerd with a fondness for Dunsany, Piazzolla, and Pan-Fried Noodles. He lives in Western Oregon where it isn’t as rainy as people think it is.
Philip Kobylarz is an itinerant teacher of the language arts and writer of fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays. He has worked as a journalist, a film critic, a veterinarian’s assistant, a deliverer of furniture, and an ascetic. He has volunteered at the Union City Historical Museum. His work appears in such publications as Paris Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry series, Massachusetts Review, and Lalitamba. He also published a collection poetry entitled rues and a collection of short stories entitled Now Leaving Nowheresville. He spends his time in the East Bay, Huntington Beach, and in the monastery in which he lives with his cat KatdawgRocket 99, his dog Chibi, and any woman who is able to temporarily love him.
Gary Lark’s most recent collections are Easter Creek, Main Street Rag, Daybreak on the Water, Flowstone Press and Ordinary Gravity, Airlie Press . His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Catamaran, Rattle, Sky Island and others.
Dan Liberthson: Born in Rochester, NY, Dan attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English), has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, OR. He has published five books of poetry and individual poems in many journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and Chaminade Literary Review. Dan served as Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association from 2019-2022. His awards include second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and in the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022), and First Honorable Mention in the Georgia Poetry Society Contest (2022). In 2012, Dan’s poem “Child’s Play” was read by Garrison Keillor on his weekly radio broadcast The Writer’s Almanac. Dan has also written The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a fantasy novel for preteens. For descriptions of Dan’s books and to order them, please visit liberthson.com.
Sue Fagalde Lick is a writer/musician/dog mom living on the Oregon coast. She has published two chapbooks, Gravel Road Ahead and The Widow at the Piano. Her poems have also appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Sage Soup, Naugatuck River Review, New Letters, Cirque, The American Journal of Poetry, Diode Poetry Journal, and other publications. When not writing, she’s playing piano, guitar, or mandolin and singing. The poems published in this issue of Triggerfish will be included in a chapbook titled Blue Chip Stamp Guitar, coming out in March 2024 from The Poetry Box.
Paul Nelson has ten books of poetry including an AWP winner and a University of Alabama Press Selection. An NEA Fellow, his first book of fiction, REFRIGERATOR CHURCH, Tailwinds Press, NYC, came out in 2018. A chapbook of poetry, BLACK DOG, Main Street Rag Press is just out, Spring, ’22, and a new ms. of fiction, CANARY IN THE KITCHEN, is near ready, as is a new ms. of poetry: JUST BREATHING. For near a decade he directed Creative Writing for Ohio University.
Kristen Rembold’s next book of poetry, The Harvesters, from Future Cycle Press was published in January, 2023. An earlier collection, Music Lesson, was published in 2019. She also published two chapbooks of poetry, Leaf and Tendril, and Coming into This World, and a novel, Felicity, winner of Mid-List Press First Fiction Series Award. Her writing has also appeared in Smartish Pace, Green Mountains Review, Literary Mama, New Ohio Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Cider Press Review, among others. She holds degrees from Northwestern University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for writers and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and also is an alumna of the Colrain poetry seminars. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has served as Co-Editor and Fiction Editor at the University of Virginia’s IRIS: A Journal About Women, as well as working for other publications.
Sherry Mossafer Rind is the author of four books and two chapbooks of poetry. She has received grants and awards from Anhinga Press, the Seattle and King County Arts Commissions, National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. Her most recent book is The Store-House of Wonder and Astonishment, winner of an Eyelands International award, published by Pleasure Boat Studio, 2022. https://sherryrind.wixsite.com/writer
Mykyta Ryzhykh resides in Nova Kakhovka Citу, Ukraine. Winner of the international competition «Art Against Drugs», bronze medalist of the festival Chestnut House, laureate of the literary competition named after Tyutyunnik. Published in the journals Dzvin, Ring A, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Colon, Literature Factory, Literary Chernihiv, on the portals Literary Center and Soloneba, in The Ukrainian Literary Newspaper, in the almanac Syaivo. I receive a scholarship from the President of Ukraine for young artists.
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 retired NASA 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.
Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review 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.
Paul Willis has published seven collections, the most recent of which is Somewhere to Follow (Slant Books, 2021). Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Ascent, Christian Century, and Tahoma Literary Review. He is a retired professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. www.pauljwillis.com
Martha Zweig’s collections include GET LOST; MONKEY LIGHTNING, WHAT KIND and VINEGAR BONE, plus chapbooks POWERS and A SKIRMISH OF HARKS. Recognitions include MFA from Warren Wilson, Hopwoods, a Whiting Award, and Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations. She lives in Vermont where she worked ten years handling garments in a pajama factory (including a term as ILGWU shop chair) and ten years as an advocate for seniors.