Author Bios

Eileen Berry lives in South Carolina, where she is an educational content writer and teaches creative writing courses at a local Christian university. She has written numerous lyrics for church choral music and art songs published by Beckenhorst Press, Hal Leonard, and Lorenz. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Time of Singing, The Clayjar Review, Persephone, As Surely as the Sun, and elsewhere.

Seán Carlson is working on his first book, a family memoir of migration. His essays have been published by Gulf Coast, The Irish Times, The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in Crannóg, Dappled Things, Image, The Irish Independent’s New Irish Writing, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, and elsewhere. Seán was awarded a 2025 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award for Literature and a 2024 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation poetry fellowship in Bulgaria.

Jonathan Chan is a writer, editor, and translator of poems and essays. His first collection of poems, going home (Landmark, 2022), was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024. His second collection is bright sorrow (Landmark, 2025). He serves as Managing Editor of the poetry archive poetry.sg. He has recently been moved by the work of Maggie O'Farrell, Raymond Antrobus, and Yuki Tanaka. More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com.

Sarah Crowley Chestnut lives and works at L’Abri Fellowship in Southborough, Massachusetts with her husband and two children. Sarah’s poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Every Moment Holy Vol. III, The Anglican Theological Review, The Christian Century, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. Sarah has a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Regent College.

Craig Constantine has been a day laborer, bread baker, furniture mover, and TV producer. Now a poet, his hardest, worst-paid, best job. Six of his poems currently appear in magazines in the US, UK, and Australia.

Erin Edinger (she/her) is a poet and farmhand based in Northwest Arkansas. She serves as Teaching Assistant for the CAFF Farm School, Associate Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review, and Reader for The Arkansas International. Erin earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. You can find her new or forthcoming work in Yellow Arrow, LIT, and elsewhere. Find more at erinedinger.com.

Paul Michael Garrison (MFA, Converse) is a writer, editor, educator, and actor living in Upstate South Carolina. He is the author of two novels, Letters to the Editor and The Lies People Publish. His short fiction has previously appeared in The Windhover, Quantum Fairy Tales, and Heart of Flesh.  

Kevin Grauke has published poems in such places as The Threepenny Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Minnesota Review, Ninth Letter, and The Louisville Review. He is the author of the short-story collections Shadows of Men and West of Destry, and a third short-story collection, Bullies & Cowards, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in late 2026. He teaches at La Salle University and lives in Philadelphia.

Luke Harvey lives in Chickamauga, Georgia, where he teaches high school English. His first full-length collection, Let's Call It Home, was published in the Poiema Series by Cascade Books with endorsements from poets like Scott Cairns, Malcolm Guite, Luci Shaw, and Mark S. Burrows, and other poems have appeared in magazines such Southern Poetry Review, Spiritus, The Christian Century, Radix and elsewhere. He holds his MFA from Seattle Pacific University.

Nathaniel Q Hoover writes poetry, fiction, and gag cartoons. He received his MFA degree from Seattle Pacific University, and currently teaches writing at SPU. You can find him on Substack at Writing Under the Writing. He lives in Seattle with his wife and sons.

Renee Kalagayan is an Asian-American writer and editor from South Carolina whose work is featured or forthcoming in About Place, South Florida Poetry Journal, Last Leaves, Listening Journal, and others. She manages social media and reads poems for South 85 Journal. Find her on social media @rkalagayanpoet.

J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals & magazines. Kane was a finalist for the 2025 Welkin Prize for Fiction and received the Reader’s Choice Award, was Shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short-Fiction, Shortlisted for and then named a finalist in the 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), long-listed for the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Contest (UK) and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His work "Removal" has been contracted by Plough. Kane admires compression and exhibits a willingness to trust his reader. He is an attorney and lives in New Orleans with his dogs, family, and a house filled with art.

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of No Eden (2011) and Book of Asters (2014), both from Mayapple Press, and Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online.

Maureen McQuerry is a poet, novelist, and educator. Her novels have been selected for YALSA best fiction, ALA best book, and Bank Street Best Books and published in five languages. Her poetry has been featured widely in literary journals such as The Southern Review, Georgetown Review, Nimrod and Atlanta Review.  For many years she taught middle school through college. She lives on an island near Seattle with her husband, a hive full of bees, and two noisy chickens.

Mark Paalman’s work appears in Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, Pure in Heart, and the anthology Beyond Stories 2. Other fiction and reflection can be found online at “Pomalom’s Ponderings” (http://pomalom.substack.com). He is also a member of the Catholic Writers Guild. Mark, a PhD molecular biologist, supervises a research integrity investigation team at a major academic publisher.  

David J.S. Pickering is a native Oregonian, having grown up and lived much of his life in the working-class culture of the North Oregon Coast. His first poetry collection, Jesus Comes to Me as Judy Garland, received the Airlie Prize in 2020. His poetry is published in a variety of journals including Cirque, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Passager, Tar River Poetry, Mantis, Muleskinner Journal, Lips, and Reed Magazine. David lives with his husband in Portland Oregon where, even as you read this, he has likely had too much coffee.

Mika Seifert is a writer, concert violinist and broker of rare old violin bows. His short stories and essays have been published in The Antioch Review, Chicago Review, Image Journal, The London Magazine, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. In 2023, he founded his own company, Seifert Rare Bows, and is currently at work on a book about the magical world of bowmaking. 

Sarah Southern is a graduate student in writing based in San Diego, where she also teaches English Composition to college freshmen. Her work has appeared in Earthbeat, Terrain.org, and Washington Square Review.

Emma Galloway Stephens is a neurodivergent poet and professor from the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Red Branch Review, The Christian Century, Door is a Jar, Salvation South, and many others. She's the author of No Billboard Gospel: Poems (Solum Literary Press). Read more at egstephenspoetry.com.

Patrick Trombly’s poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in several journals including Connecticut River Review, Roanoke Review, 1922 Review (Midwestern State University), The Closed Eye Open, The Dewdrop, Loch Raven Review, Die Leere Mitte, Amethyst Review, The Argyle, Prosetrics, In Parentheses, Beyond Words, PHIL LIT Journal (contest shortlist), and Four Tulips (contest finalist). He has a short story forthcoming in Résonance (University of Maine). Patrick lives in Manhattan with his partner, Corinne.

Paul Willis has published eight collections and six chapbooks of poetry, the most recent of which is Orvieto (Solum Literary Press, 2025). Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Christian Century, and Southern Poetry Review. He is an emeritus professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

Elizabeth Bolton holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Project and her essays have been published in Puerto del Sol, River Styx, West Branch, wildness, The Dodge, Grub Street and elsewhere. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Jenevieve Carlyn lives in New England. Her writing has appeared widely in places such as Parabola, The Madrid Review, Braided Way, Sage Magazine from Yale’s School of the Environment, The Dark Mountain Project, and elsewhere, including the anthology In the Garden: Community Storytelling on Food, Ecology, & Place (Torrey House Press). In 2023, she won the Connecticut Poet Laureate Award for Eco-Poetry and the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred. She was shortlisted in the 2025 Artemesia Arts Contest and highly commended in the Mist & Mountain Competition for her poem on the 2025 theme of peace.

S. D. Carpenter was born and raised on the Llano Estacado in Texas. She currently works for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Her writing has appeared in Pleiades, America Magazine, Amethyst Review, and The Windhover.

Richard Cole is the author of three books of poetry: The Glass Children (The University of Georgia Press), Success Stories (Limestone Books), and Song of the Middle Manager (winner of the Grayson Books 2021 Poetry Book Contest, Grayson Books). He is also the author of a memoir, Catholic by Choice (Loyola Press). His poems and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Hudson Review, Sun Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, The Main Street Rag, The Penn Review, Image Journal, and various anthologies. Honors include an NEA fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series award, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Bush Foundation grant. Cole works as a business writer in Austin, Texas. www.richard-cole.net.

John Ellis’ narrative essays, poems, articles, and book reviews have appeared in African Writer Magazine, Able Muse Review, Salvo Magazine, Relief Journal, Kalahari Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, and The Clayjar Review, among other periodicals. Ellis was raised in West Africa, Europe, and the Northeastern United States; in 2020, he earned a Fulbright Scholarship to Senegal, to write about West Africa. Currently, he lives in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area.

Jenna K Funkhouser is a Pacific Northwest-based artist and poet. Her work explores the contours of what it means to be human: all the profound, terrifying, terribly real ways life splits us open and makes us whole. It’s no surprise, then, that she pairs the play of words with the play of light as a mosaic artist forever learning to make the shattered pieces sing. Recent poems have been published by Ekstasis, St. Katherine Review, Penwood Review, and St. Austen Review, among others. You can find her most recent ekphrastic collection, Bright Inhabited Lives (Kelsay Books), and other recent work at jennakfunkhouser.com.

Charity Gingerich is from Northeast Ohio, where she teaches, writes and sings from her little yellow barn office (within earshot of Almanzo the rooster). She enjoys singing choral music and is a member of the Chancel choir at her church. You can find her first full collection of poems, After June (Green Writers Press, 2019), wherever books are sold, and read a selection of publications at Charitygingerich.com.

Patricia Nagy Gyuris is a Romanian-born, California-based writer. She developed a passion for poetry, flash fiction and flash non-fiction at Sierra College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in BULL lit mag and redrosethorns journal.

Marcia L. Hurlow's chapbook of poetry, Dog Physics, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing, fall 2024. Her newest full-length collection, Practice Rapture, was published in May 2025 by Pine Row Press. Her poems have recently appeared in Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, After Happy Hours, Free State Review, Mudfish, The Naugatuck River Review, and I-70 Review, among others. She is co-editor-in-chief of Kansas City Review.

Douglas Jones, MFA poetry (Univ. of Idaho), MA philosophy (Univ. of Southern Cal) has published work in McSweeney’s, Amethyst Review, Phil Lit Journal, Antiphon, Books and Culture, Valparaiso Poetry Review, River Oak Review, and California Quarterly. He serves as church poet at St. Luke’s, San Diego, CA.

Sarah Kimmet is an assistant professor in the international humanities program of a university in northern Thailand. She has published academic articles in MELUS, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and The Henry James Review. Recently she published her first work of creative nonfiction in Panorama: The Journal Of Travel, Place, and Nature.

Zachary Kosma, CEO of Kosma Co Games, is a writer, educator, and game designer whose work examines power, work, and moral choice through creative narrative, non-fiction, and speculative forms. His fiction explores how meaning emerges through dialogue, restraint, and lived obligation. 

Dan Leach has published poems in The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, and The Sun. He is the 2023 recipient of Texas Review Press’s Southern Poetry Breakthrough Award, and his collection Stray Latitudes was released in 2024.

A longtime New Englander, Marilyn MacArthur is a poet and CNF writer who works in human services and actually loves and respects humans. Her poems have appeared in Spare Parts Lit, Macrame Literary Journal, Nixes Mate Review, and Amethyst Review. A dog person who adores her cat, she is fascinated with archaeology and linguistics, loves Dr. Who and the Lord, and delights in musical comedies and Celtic rock.

Judith H. Montgomery’s poems appear in South Florida Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, and Epiphany, among other journals, and in many anthologies. She’s published two full-length books and four chapbooks. The first, Passion, received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her second full-length collection, Litany for Wound and Bloom, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Prize, appeared in 2018. Her prize-winning narrative medicine chapbook, Mercy (2019), was followed by The Ferry Keeper, which chronicles her care for her parents on their final journey. It received the 2024 Grayson Books Chapbook Prize.

Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, LETTERS, One Art, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead, her first poetry collection, was published by Slant in 2020. Her second collection, Blue Between Owls, was awarded the 2024 Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and was published in April 2026 by Codhill Press.

John Poch is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Grace College. His work has appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The Nation, and many other literary magazines. His eighth collection of poems is The Future of Love (Slant Books, March 2026).

Christianna Soumakis is an artist, writer, art instructor, scholar, and pilgrim. She has an MFA in Fine Art, is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and has walked the Camino de Santiago three times, for a total of over 1,380 miles on foot across France, Spain, and (thanks to a generous grant from the Conference for Christian Literature) Portugal. She lives in New York.

Jack Stewart was educated at the University of Alabama and Emory University and was a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology. His book No Reason was published by the Poeima Poetry Series, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The American Literary Review, Image, Crannóg, and others.

Richard Stimac lives in the St. Louis, Missouri (USA) area. He has published two poetry books: Blood, Water, and Stone (Spartan Press, 2026); and Bricolage (Spartan Press, 2022). Richard explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region. He invites you to follow his poetry Facebook page: “Richard Stimac poet.”

Sharon White is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, winner of the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Her first novel, Minato Sketches, won the Rosemary Daniell Prize and is published by Minerva Rising Press. If the Owl Calls, a mystery, is published by Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW. Her new collection of poetry is The Body is Burden and Delight. Recent nonfiction appears in Solstice Literary Magazine, Miracle Monocle, Cleaver, Ways of Walking, Switch, DIAGRAM, The Rupture, and Nowhere Magazine. She is an Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University.