Contributor Notes, Issue #34
Scott Beal is the author of Stegosaurus Moon (Dzanc Books, 2026) and Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014) as well as the chapbook The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). He teaches writing at the University of Michigan and directs the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts program. He co-hosts the monthly Skazat! online poetry series and co-edits Public School Poetry.
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.
Dale Champlin is a poet and artist. Her poems have appeared in The Opiate, Timberline Review, Willawaw, CatheXis, Cirque, Triggerfish, andelsewhere. Dale’s honors include a Pushcart nomination, a first place in the Oregon Poetry Association contest and the Banta Award. Dale designs books for Cirque Press and Just a Lark Books. She enjoys creating collages and hosting outstanding poets. Her poetry collections are: The Barbie Diaries, Callie Comes of Age, Isadora, Andromina: A Stranger in America, and Medusa an illustrated collection of poetry. Two books of erotic poetry, Victims of Desire, and Careless Abandon are forthcoming from Opiate Books.
Douglas Cole has published eight poetry collections, including The Cabin at the End of the World, winner of the Best Book Award in Urban Poetry, and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly. He contributes a regular column, “Trading Fours,” to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician. He also edits the American Writers section of Read Carpet, a journal of international writing produced in Columbia. In addition to the American Fiction Award, his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival. He has been awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated Eight times for a Pushcart and Nine times for Best of the Net. His website can be found at douglastcole.com
Nancy Christopherson’s poems have appeared in Abandon Journal, Aji Magazine, Amethyst Review, Barnstorm Journal, Cirque, Clepsydra Literary & Art Magazine, Common Ground Review, Free State Review, Helen Literary Magazine, Hole in the Head Review, Kosmos Quarterly Spring Gallery of Poets, Peregrine, Raven Chronicles, The Cape Rock, The Healing Muse, The Stillwater Review, Third Wednesday, Triggerfish Critical Review, Verseweavers, Willawaw Journal, and Xanadu, among others. Author of “The Leaf”, she resides in Oregon and is a former executive board member of Oregon Poetry Association. Visit https://www.nancychristophersonpoetry.com.
Maida Cummings always enjoyed making things. In the early 1990s she started taking art classes at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts. She enjoyed it so much that she’s been concentrating on making art ever since.
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Cardinal Sins, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and The Muse Writers Center in Virginia.
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.
John Garmon is an 84-year-old poet at the College of Southern Nevada. He spent four years in the Marines, earned a Ph.D., taught for a while, and served three years as president of Berkeley City College. His poems appeared in Triggerfish, Oyster River Pages, Commonweal, The Oregonian, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Oddball Magazine, Poet Lore, Concho River Review, Southern Humanities Review, and other magazines.
Craig Goodworth: 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.
Keith Hansen: Husband, father, grandfather, drywall contractor, reader of some books, owner of too many books.
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, forthcoming), Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required (Pork Belly Press, 2014).
Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, Atlanta Review, Permafrost, and Pirene’s Fountain. His first book is scheduled for 2025 publication by Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in The Garlic Press, Remington Review, and ONE ART. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Nashville, Tennessee. (jamescroaljackson.com)
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. 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.
Debra Kaufman’s newest poetry collection is Outwalking the Shadow (Redhawk). Previous books are God Shattered, Delicate Thefts, The Next Moment (all from Jacar Press), and A Certain Light (Emrys Press), as well as three chapbooks. She has written five full-length plays, most recently Seeing Light, and many monologues and short plays.
Phil Kirsch received his MFA in Poetry from Goddard College in 1980, 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.
Charles Lewis lives and writes poetry in East Lansing, Michigan.
DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has been nominated thirteen times for BOTN, ten for the Pushcart and once for the Forward Prize, and released in three collections; “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022)
Bruce Parker has published two chapbooks, Ramadan in Summer, (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and Tears for Things (Plan B Press, 2024). He holds a BA in History from the University of Maryland, Far East Division, Okinawa, Japan; and an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. His work appears in Triggerfish Critical Review, The Field Guide, Wild Roof, Cerasus (UK), Brussels Review (Belgium) and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. Married to fellow poet and artist Diane Corson, he lives in Portland, Oregon.
Mykyta Ryzhykh: He/him Author from Ukraine, now living in Tromsø, Norway. Nominated for Pushcart Prize 2023, 2024. Published many times in literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal and many others.
Michael Salcman: is a retired physician and teacher of art history, a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Raritan and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti; The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical matters (Persea Books, 2015); A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize); and Shades & Graces, the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize in 2020. Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published in 2022, and Crossing the Tape: New Poems was published by Spuyten Duyvil in May, 2024.
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.
David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.
Rachel Turney is an educator and artist located in Denver. Her disappearing chapbook Europe in Black and White is available on Blood + Honey July and August 2025. bloodhoneylit.com. Blog: turneytalks.wordpress.com Instagram: @turneytalks Bluesky: @rachelturney
William Welch: lives in Utica, NY where he works as a registered nurse. His poetry has appeared in various journals, including Little Patuxent Review, Stone Canoe, Rust+Moth, and Cider Press Review, and his collection Adding Saffron (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming in 2025. He edits Doubly Mad (doublymad.org). Find more about him on his website, williamfwelch.com.
Jan Wiezorek writes from Michigan. His debut poetry chapbook, Forests of Woundedness, is forthcoming this fall from Seven Kitchens Press. Wiezorek’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming, in The London Magazine, The Westchester Review, Lucky Jefferson, The Broadkill Review, LEON Literary Review, and elsewhere. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and authored the teachers’ ebook Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011). Wiezorek’s poems have been awarded by the Poetry Society of Michigan.
Martha Zweig’s four full-length poetry collections include GET LOST, DHP Oregon; MONKEY LIGHTNING, Tupelo, and WHAT KIND and VINEGAR BONE, both from Wesleyan University Press. Her chapbooks are POWERS, Stinehour Press, Vermont Council on the Arts, and A SKIRMISH OF HARKS, Jacar e-book. Zweig’s recognitions include Hopwood Awards, a Whiting Award, Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and a Warren Wilson MFA. She lives in Vermont where she worked ten years as an advocate for seniors, after ten years handling garments in a pajama factory where she served a term as ILGWU shop chair.