Pinny Bulman is a Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO award-winning poet and author of old shul (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023). He has been winner of the Poets of NYC Contest, recipient of several ADR Poetry Awards, and a finalist for the Raynes Poetry Prize. His poems have been anthologized, including in Korean translation for Bridging the Waters III (Korean Expatriate Literature & Cross-Cultural Communications, 2020). Additional literary publications include San Pedro River Review, great weather for MEDIA, The London Reader, Artemis, Muddy River Poetry Review, Red Paint Hill, Jewish Currents, and Poetry Quarterly.
Christa Fairbrother, MA, is the current poet laureate of Gulfport, Florida. Her poetry has appeared in Arc Poetry, Pleiades, and Salamander and is upcoming in Rogue Agent, The Muse, and The Prose Poem. She’s had residencies with the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Bethany Arts Community, and her chapbook, Chronically Walking, was a finalist for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. Water Yoga (Singing Dragon, 2022), her nonfiction book, won medals from the Nautilus Book Awards and the Florida Writers Association Royal Palm Literary Awards. Her two favorite things are tea and books. Connect with her at www.christfairbrotherwrites.com.
Sarah Das Gupta is an 82 year-old writer from Cambridge, UK who also worked in India and Tanzania as an English language teacher. She started writing last year after an accident restricted her walking to 20 metres with crutches. Writing has presented a challenge and an incentive. Her work has been published in many magazines and anthologies including: The New English Review, The American Writers Review, Songs of Eretz, Tales from the Moonlit Path, Ekphrastic Challenge, Lothlorien, among many others.
Amanda Hayden is the Poet Laureate and award-winning Humanities Professor for Sinclair College. Her debut collection, American Saunter, will be published in Fall 2024 by FlowerSong Press. Her first chapbook, How to Tie Tobacco as well as her second full-length collection, Old World Wings, will be released in 2025 by Wild Ink Publishing. She is a Pushcart Poetry Prize Nominee and recently won the 2023 River Heron Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize for her poem, “The Faery Bridges.” She lives with her family and many furry rescue babies, including their very special blind, three-legged pup named Vinny Valentine. https://windychickenpoet.com/
A dreamer since birth, Victoria Marie Lees doesn’t do anything the easy way. To explore nature, she camps with her husband and their five children in the mountains, forests, deserts, on beaches by lakes and oceans. She’s done this for over 20 years, sharing their many adventures and misadventures online at Camping with Five Kids https://www.victoriamarielees.com/. She also began a college journey while raising those five children, a journey which started at a community college and led to an Ivy League scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania.
Karla Linn Merrifield has had 1000+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 16 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her newest poetry collection, My Body the Guitar, recently nominated for the National Book Award, was inspired by famous guitarists and their guitars and published in December 2021 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series (Rochester, NY). She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review. Web site: https://www.karlalinnmerrifield.org/; blog at https://karlalinnmerrifeld.wordpress.com/; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel; https://www.facebook.com/karlalinn.merrifield.
Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney,is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird (Jerry Jazz Musician 2024) is an album of poems, art and music available at Jerry Jazz Musician. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and online literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book, Merging Star Hypotheses, was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies, An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.
Samuel(he/him/his) is an indigenous writer of poetry & other works of art. Samuel has been previously published in ExistOtherwise Magazine, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Access Poetry & elsewhere. Samuel got an honorable mention in the recent 2022 Christopher Hewitt Award in Poetry.
Nikki Ummel is a queer artist, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki has been published or has work forthcoming with Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Black Lawrence Press, and others. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize and 2023 recipient of the Juxtaprose Poetry Award for her manuscript, Bloom. Nikki is the co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOLA DNA, 2023), funded by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com
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