Luther Allen writes poems from his mostly unmanaged 10 acres of mountainside near Bellingham, Washington. His academic work centered primarily on biology and geography; he is a retired building designer. He has published two volumes of poetry: The View from Lummi Island and A Spiritual Thread (see https://othermindpress.wordpress.com). His work is included in numerous journals and anthologies. He views writing as his spiritual practice.
Lana Hechtman Ayers makes her home in an Oregon coastal town famous for its barking sea lions. As managing editor at three small presses, she has shepherded over a hundred thirty poetry collections into print. Her work appears in print and online journals such as Comstock Review, The London Reader, and Peregrine. Her most recent book, The Autobiography of Rain, is available from Fernwood Press. Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.
Joe Carosella believes that Every Day Is a Beautiful Day. He hikes avidly, and loves nature, reading, ice cream, travel, and language(s). He writes, and spends time with family. His first book is Making Friends with God: A Year of Dialogues (Amazon KDP, 2024). Rabbit Tracks: The Poetry of Nature (Shanti Arts, 2025) is his second book. Joe’s poems have appeared in The Soliloquist, Amethyst Review, Adirondac, and Adirondack Almanack. He lives in Scotia, NY with his wife, Diury Alvarado.
S. D. Carpenter was born and raised on the Llano Estacado in Texas. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Texas Tech University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She currently works as an assistant director at a research data archive for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Her writing has appeared in Pleiades.
Barbara Lydecker Crane has won the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown
Contest, the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest, and was a Finalist for the
Rattle Poetry Prize. Her most recent book is You Will Remember Me
(Able Muse Press); Kelsay Books will soon publish her fifth
collection, Art & Soul.
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia where his yard is lush with vegetation. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Soul-Lit, Poets Reading the News, As It Ought To Be, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Patricia Daly is a USA Today bestselling author and writer of narrative nonfiction and spirituality. She has been published by Leaders Press, Story Circle Network, The Sun, Medium.com, and Reiki News Magazine. She indie-published The Women in His Life, Indelible Imprint, and The Deliberate Thinker, all available on Amazon. She is retired and lives in Largo, Florida, USA.
We Have Our Beginning in the Unbegun
Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Amethyst Review, America Magazine, Pensive Journal, Forma Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets. He is a certified catechist with the Archdiocese of New York, a Benedictine oblate of St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, NJ, and editor of The Catholic Poetry Room.
Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and resides in New England, where she teaches multilingual learners at a public elementary school. Her work has appeared in The Manifest Station, Salvation South, Inscape Magazine and other places.
Michelle Hasty is an education professor in Tennessee. Her academic writing has been published in literacy journals, such as Voices from the Middle and The Reading Teacher. Her short story, “Prone to Wander” was published in the Dillydoun Daily Review. Her poem, “Overheard, an offering” was published in Bluebird Word.
Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, Borrowed Scenery, Yuganta Press, and Through the Trees of Autumn, Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild.
Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry; her work has earned the Able Muse Book Award, the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honors. A Professor Emeritus of Music at Bridgewater State University, she has published articles on the intersections between music and literature in numerous academic journals. She lives on the coast of Massachusetts.
James Lilliefors is a poet and novelist, whose writing has appeared in Door Is A Jar, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, The Belfast Review, The Miami Herald, and elsewhere. His first poetry collection, Sudden Shadows, was published in October.
Charlene Langfur is an LGBTQ and green writer, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow and her writing has appeared in Poetry East, Room, Weber and most recently in The Healing Muse, Still Points Arts Quarterly and the North Dakota Quarterly.
Melanie McCabe is the author of four books of poems, most recently the forthcoming All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize. Her debut novel Road Longer Than Memory will be out from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Prize.
Christopher McCammon is a writer and teacher living in coastal Virginia. His philosophical work has appeared in The American Philosophical Quarterly, Ethics, and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His poetry has recently been published in Blue Collar Review. With friends inside and outside local prisons and jails, he co-organizes the Tidewater Solidarity Bail Fund.
Dana Holley Maloney teaches English at Montclair State University. For a long time, she worked with high school students, as a teacher of English and Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in Lips, North Dakota Quarterly, English Journal, and Journal of New Jersey Poets and are forthcoming in Paterson Literary Review and Pine Hills Review. At Duke University, she received the Anne Flexner Award for Poetry. When not in New Jersey, she lives in Freeport, Maine. When not writing, she is likely gardening.
The Reader Engages with the Text
John C. Mannone’s Christian-infused work appears in Windhover, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Artemis, Windward Review, and others. Awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature, his five full-length collections include the Weatherford Award-nominated Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023) and the Tennessee Book Award 2025 finalist, Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2024). He’s a retired professor of physics living in East Tennessee.
Marso writes poetry shaped by years of living in different cultures and by a practice of paying attention to ordinary life.
Tired as a Cold Gray Winter Day
Rita Moe’s poetry has appeared in Water~Stone, Poet Lore, Amethyst Review, Mad Swirl, and other literary journals. Besides poetry, she enjoys cartooning, knitting, gardening. Now retired from an investment firm, she has two grown sons and lives with her husband in Roseville, MN
Bruce Morton divides his time between Montana and Arizona. He is the author of Planet Mort (FootHills, 2024) and the chapbook, Olive-drab Khaki Blues, forthcoming from FootHills Publishing. His poems have appeared in numerous online and print venues. He was formerly dean at the Montana State University library.
Al Ortolani’s newest collection of poems, The Taco Boat, was recently released by NYQ Books. He is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize and has been featured in the Writer’s Almanac and the American Life in Poetry. His most recent publication is a novel, Bull in the Ring, published by Meadow Lark Books. Ortolani is a husband, father, and grandfather, currently entertaining the idea of becoming a hermit. However, his wife prefers the company of the neighborhood feminists, and his dog Stanley refuses to live without Milk-Bone.
Danielle Page is a truth-teller, educator, and writer currently hailing from rural Maryland. She strives to live wholeheartedly in her endeavors alongside her husband and daughters. When she’s not scribbling in her Moleskine journal, she’s tackling her To Be Read list, baking banana bread, or serving in camp ministry. She is an editor for the Clayjar Review and has been published in Ekstasis, Heart of Flesh, Vessels of Light, Traces, Solid Food Press, and elsewhere.
Steven Peterson is the author of the debut collection Walking Trees and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2025). His poems and reviews appear in The Christian Century, Dappled Things, First Things, Light, New Verse Review, The North American Anglican, The Windhover, and other publications. He and his wife live in Chicago.
Anita Pinatti lives in the Connecticut River Valley finding inspiration for poetry and photography nearby and beyond. Her work has appeared in Amethyst Review, Blue Heron Review, The Orchards, Sage Magazine and many other journals.
Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Edinburgh, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, StepAway Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals as well as in anthologies by Black Bough, Green Ink Poetry and Gothic Keats Press. His pamphlet In the Particular was published in 2017.
Patrick T. Reardon, a Chicago Tribune reporter from 1976 to 2009, is the author of seven poetry collections. His latest is Every Marred Thing: A Time in America, the winner of the 2024 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans (Lavender Ink). He is a five-time nominee in poetry for a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in America, RHINO, Commonweal, After Hours, Autumn Sky, Burningword Literary Journal and other journals.
Victor D Sandiego, once from the big city west coast of the United States, now writes his odd time compositions from his home on the edge of ex-pat society in small town. He is the founder and editor of Dog Throat Journal. His work appears in various journals and anthologies, and is upcoming in Bull and others.
Incomplete Salvation In The Tall Gray Afternoon
Sherry Weaver Smith searches for poems in graveyards, historical society museums, and on well-worn footpaths. Her poems have been published in the California Quarterly; The Heron’s Nest; The Seventh Quarry; the Origami Poems Project; Panorama, the Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature (Cities Edition); and the Arizona Literary Magazine. She has an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from Duke University.
Holly Wells‘s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Magazine of History and Fiction, Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, The Windhover, and Sojourners, among others. She lives in Mississippi and has taught English at both the high school and community college levels.
Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize and recently appeared or is forthcoming in SAND, Sierra Nevada Review, Door Is A Jar, Tint, Writers Resist, and Another Chicago Magazine, The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, and Thimble. Alina is a grateful recipient of the 2024 Washington Artist Trust Grant and committed disability advocate.
Amethyst Review 