The Plague Papers contributors

Serena Agusto-Cox, a Suffolk University alum, relies on her editing job to feed her family, but you can find her creative work in The Hill Rag, Broadkill Review, Modern Creative Life, Dime Show Review, Baseball Bard, Mothers Always Write, Bourgeon, and other journals. An essay also appears in H.L. Hix’s Made Priceless, three poems in the Love_Is_Love: An Anthology for LGBTQIA+ Teens, and a Q&A on book marketing through blogs in Midge Raymond’s Everyday Book Marketing. She also founded the book review blog, Savvy Verse & Wit, and Poetic Book Tours to help poets market their books. Read: “Superhero” and “Take Heed.”

Linda Scott Araya is a passionate writer and educator from the South Island of New Zealand. She has work published or forthcoming in Wards, The Blue Nib, The Pangolin Review and Prospectus. Read: “Isolation”.

When not teaching, Devon Balwit chases chickens in Portland, OR. Her individual poems can be found in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Sugar House Review, Rattle, Bellingham Review, and Grist among others. Her most recent chapbook is Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press, 2020]. For more regarding her online poems, her collections, and her reviews, please visit her website at:  https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet Read:  “Saint Rosalie,” “Struggling to Keep Pace,” and “Art Appreciation”.

Lavina Blossom is a painter and mixed media artist as well as a poet.  Her poems have appeared in various journals, including 3Elements Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Paris Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Poemeleon, Common Ground Review, and Ekphrastic Review.  She is an Editor of Poetry for Inlandia:  a Literary Journey. You can find some of her art at DailyPaintworks. Read:  “On Magritte’s The Flavor of Tears” and “After.”

Andrea Bowd is a PhD research student of Creative Writing at The University of Nottingham.  She has written poetry for The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, and also for the Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery as well as publishing work in other journals and anthologies. She lives in Nottinghamshire with her husband and eldest son. Read: “Drown.”

Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train in 2020 from Broadstone Books. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. She can be reached at www.susanahcase.com Read: “The World as We Know It.”

Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and author of twelve chapbooks and nine full-length books of poetry.  Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, 2019, is the latest.  Her awards include the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award,  and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.  Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including: Common Wealth:  Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, and The Bedford Introduction to Literature. She’s been on The Writer’s Almanac fifty-some times, Tracey K. Smith’s The Slowdown,  and featured on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry. Read: “The Very Rich Hours of the Duc De berry,” “Harmonie in Red, 1908,” and “Still Life with Aubergines, 1911.” 

Married almost fifty years to a father of four amazing daughters, Diane Dorman is a grandma to five, a nurse, a poet, and a nature nerd. She is the author of two chapbooks and is published in Incidental Buildings and Accidental Beauty, Blue Arc West, Caffeine, and other small presses. Read: “Trees on a Yellow Background.”

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN. His second book of poetry Mr. Rogers Kills Fruit Flies will be published by Main St. Rag in Fall 2020. You can see more of his work @ www.ferrypoetry.com Read: “Clockwise the Sleeping Octopus.”

Aaron Fischer worked for 30+ years as a print and online editor in technology publishing and public policy. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in After Happy Hour, Briar Cliff Review, Five Points, Hudson Review, Nervous Ghost, Sow’s Ear, and other publications. His chapbook, “Black Stars of Blood: The Weegee Poems,” was published last summer. He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes as well as for Best New Poets 2018. He is the winner of the Prime Numbers Magazine 2020 poetry award. Read: “The Gay Deceiver,” “Young Man Smoking a Cigarette After a Car Crash,” and “Woman Shot from a Canon.”

Marilyn Flower-Stachenfeld was fortunate to grow up in in New York City where she was nurtured by great art through visits to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan. Read: “Virtually Flat: response to a virtual presentation of Michelangelo’s Davide.”

Chad Frame’s work appears in Rattle, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, and other journals and anthologies, as well as on iTunes from the Library of Congress. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the Poetry Editor of Ovunque Siamo: New Italian-American Writing, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry improv performance troupe, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival and Retreat. Read:  “Closed Aquarium Urges Humans to Video Chat Lonely Eels.”

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She's the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA's Elgin Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets: A Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her web site is www.webbish6.com. Twitter and Instagram: @webbish6. Read: “In the Faces of Lichtenstein’s Women” and “Ode to Jeffrey Koons.”

Hedy Habra has authored three poetry collections, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019), winner of the 2020 Silver Nautilus Award, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and Finalist for the USA Best Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the USA Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes, was finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. A fifteen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work appears in numerous publications. Her website is hedyhabra.com Read: “Hokusai’s The Great Wave,” “Inside Your Palm,” and “A Bird’s Song, Unraveled.”

Penny Harter’s work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and in twenty-two collections (including chapbooks), most recently A Prayer the Body Makes (Kelsay Books, 2020). She was a featured reader at the 2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and has won three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; the Mary Carolyn Davies Award from the Poetry Society of America; the first William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award for her work in the anthology American Nature Writing 2002; and two residencies (January 2011; March 2015) from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  One of her poems was featured in American Life in Poetry, edited by Ted Kooser. You can visit her website at: pennyharterpoet.com. Read: “Ritual Mask” and “The Marfa Lights, Marfa, Texas.”

Dianna Henning’s poetry has appeared in many journals. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart prize and taught through California Poetry in Schools. She has received several CAC grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program.  Henning’s most recent collection was Cathedral of the Hand (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Find her on the web at www.diannahenning.com. Read: “Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.”

Annaliese Jakimides’s poetry and prose have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Utne Reader, Hip Mama, This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women, and other magazines and anthologies. It has also been broadcast on NPR and Maine Public. Cited in national competitions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she was a finalist for the 2019 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. After 27 years on a dirt road in northern Maine, in which she lived off (and ultimately on) the grid, she now lives in an apartment in downtown Bangor. Find her on the web at www.annaliesejakimides.com Read: “Mapping” and “Motion.”

Kendall Johnson is the author of seven nonfiction books on psychological trauma and school crisis management. He also is the author and artist of three books of poetry: Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (Inland Empire Museum of Art, 2017); Johnson’s Pasture: Living Place, Living Time (Claremont Heritage, 2018); and A Whole Lot’a Shakin’: Reconsidering Midcentury (Cholla Needles Press, 2018). In addition, he is artist and co-author with John Brantingham of A Sublime and Tragic Dance, artwork and poetry exploring Robert J. Oppenheimer  (Cholla Needles Press, 2018). His book of essays and stories Chaos & Ashes will be released by Pelekinesis in Summer, 2020. Read: “Grayed Rainbow” and “Self-Quarantine.”

Co-winner of Reed Magazine's Edwin Markham Prize (2019), Jeanne Julian is the author of the book Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Poetry Quarterly, Lascaux Prize 2016 Anthology, Minerva Rising and other journals and have won awards from The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and the North Carolina Poetry Society. She regularly reviews poetry collections for The Main Street Rag. She lives in South Portland, Maine. www.jeannejulian.com Read: “Icelandic Picnic.”

Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent collections of poetry are Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Groaning and Singing, her fifth book of poetry, will be published by FutureCycle in February, 2022. Judy’s poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Ghost Town, New Ohio Review, One (Jacar Press), Rattle, South Florida Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals, and in more than two dozen  anthologies. She is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside.  Read: “Unfinished Painting” and “Madame Monet and Her Son en Plein Air.”

Jane Rosenberg LaForge lives and writes poetry, fiction, and occasional essays in New York. Her next full-length collection of poetry will be Medusa's Daughter from Animal Heart Press in 2021. Her next novel will be Sisterhood of the Infamous from New Meridian Arts Literary Press in 2021. Her 2018 novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War (Amberjack Publishing), was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer awards. She reviews books for American Book Review and reads poetry for Counterclock literary magazine. Read: “In the Land of Pleasant Living.”

Joan Leotta is a writer and story performer. Her poems, essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in a wide variety of publications. She has won several poetry awards and has been a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet. Her first chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon is out from Finishing Line Press. Read: “Is She Yearning to Go Out.”

Christina Lovin's prose and poetry have appeared in over one hundred different literary journals and anthologies, as well as six volumes of poetry (God of Sparrows, Echo, A Stirring in the Dark, Flesh, Little Fires, and What We Burned for Warmth). She is the recipient of numerous poetry awards, writing residencies, fellowships, and grants, most notably the AWP Kurt Brown Scholarship, the Al Smith Fellowship from Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment Grants, and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Read: “Assumptions of the Virgin” and “Cezanne’s The Bathers.”

Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning mixed media artist whose collage paintings are exhibited and collected all over the world. A journalism graduate, she writes most often about art. Her latest collection of ekphrastic prose poems is Pretty Time Machine. Her work has been published in a dozen anthologies and hundreds of literary journals. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and twice nominated for Best of the Net, making it to finalist. She is the editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to writing inspired by art. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca. Read: “The Hell Cat” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

Margaret Mackinnon’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Image, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review.  She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. Her first book, The Invented Child, won the 2011 Gerald Cable Book Award and the 2014 Literary Award in Poetry given by the Library of Virginia. Naming the Natural World received the 2017 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review chapbook award. Read: “The Artist Paints His Wife.”

Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection, four children and young adult books, and 600+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. She is the co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and assistant poetry editor of Presence. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com Read: “Prince Henry Hospital Nursing and Medical Museum” and “Liberty Quarantined.”

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook “The Belly Remembers”, and two full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine”, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig and many other publications. She has recently retired from teaching English and French in Los Angeles and is happy to finally get some sleep. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com. Read: “Family Portrait” and “Blue Nude”

Betsy Mars is a poet, photographer, and occasional small publisher. She founded Kingly Street Press and released her first anthology, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife, in October 2019. Her work has recently appeared in Verse Virtual, Sky Island, Muddy River Review, San Pedro River Review, Live Encounters, and Better Than Starbucks. Her chapbook, Alinea, was published by Picture Show Press in January 2019. In the Muddle of the Night, with Alan Walowitz, is coming soon from Arroyo Seco Press. Read: “Noah’s Ark,” “Apparitions,” and “Convergence.”

Joan Mazza  has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and teacher of workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self.  Her work has appeared in Italian Americana, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Prairie Schooner, and The Nation,  among other places. She lives in rural central Virginia where she writes a poem every day and has been baking bread since long before Covid-19. www.JoanMazza.com Read: “Baculum.”

Mary McCarthy has always been a writer though she spent most of her working life as a Registered Nurse. Writing ekphrastic poetry has become a particular favorite activity for her. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including 3 Elements Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and Third Wednesday. Her electronic chapbook Things I Was Told Not to Think About is available as a free download from Praxis Magazine. Read: “Last Judgment in the Initial C” and “Night Terrors.”

Penelope Moffet is the author of two chapbooks, It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, 1995). Her poems have appeared in many literary journals as well as in a few anthologies. Read: “The Railway.”

Robbi Nester is still mostly staying home during this chaotic time of the virus, writing and revising poems and cooking up kooky ideas like the one for this anthology. She is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent being Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019), and the editor of 3 anthologies, including The Plague Papers. In 2017, her anthology Birds, Beasts, and Trees: celebrating the photography of Beth Moon, appeared as a special issue of Poemeleon. Read: “The Demon Speaks,” “Momento Mutter: At the Mutter Museum” and “Editor’s Note.”

Martin Ott has published ten books of poetry and fiction, including FAKE NEWS POEMS (BlazeVOX Books), which was a finalist for the Big Other Book Award. He has won two books awards—the De Novo Prize and University of Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize—was a Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, and has been published in more than 20 anthologies and 300 magazines, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Harvard Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Zyzzyva. Read: “Fools of Ship.”

A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past quarter-century in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his verse has lately appeared in several anthologies: The View From Olympia (Half Moon Books, UK), What We Talk About It When We Talk About It, (Darkhouse Books), Headcase, (Oxford UP), Lovejets (Squares and Rebels), and What Remains (Gelles-Cole). Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Read: “Waiting for the Fall, or The Uncertainty of the Plague.”

Cati Porter is founder and editor of Poemeleon. The recipient of an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles, she is the author of nine poetry books and chapbooks, including most recently Slow Unraveling of Living Ghosts (Inlandia Books, 2020; with Johnny Bender and illustrated by Steve “Lu” Lossing), and The Body at a Loss (CavanKerry Press, 2019). She is executive director of Inlandia Institute. Read: “Field Day.”

Jessica Purdy teaches Poetry Workshops at Southern New Hampshire University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including gravel, The Plath Poetry Project, The Ekphrastic Review, The Light Ekphrastic, SurVision, The Wild Word, isacoustic, Nixes Mate Review, Bluestem Magazine, The Telephone Game, The Tower Journal, and The Cafe Review, among others. Her chapbook, Learning the Names, was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. Her books Starland and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate Books consecutively, in 2017 and 2018. Read: “I was” and “Pink Bathroom:  Deceased: Mrs. Rose Fishman March 31, 1942.”

Lindsey Royce’s poems have appeared in American and international periodicals and anthologies, including the Aeolian Harp 5 anthology; Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts (periodicals and anthologies); The Dreaming Machine: Writing and Visual Arts from the World; and Poet Lore. Her poems, The Sensual Sea and Adagio for Heart Strings, were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Royce’s first poetry collection, Bare Hands, was published by Turning Point in September of 2016, and her second collection, Play Me a Revolution, published by Press 53 in September of 2019, won the silver medal for poetry in the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Read: “Magritte’s The Lovers II”

Amy Small-McKinney’s poems have been published in numerous journals, for example, Connotation Press, American Poetry Review, Tiferet, Pedestal Magazine, and are forthcoming in the Baltimore Review. Her poem “Birthplace” received Special Merits recognition by The Comstock Review for their 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest. Her second full-length book of poems, Walking Toward Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize 2016 (Glass Lyre Press). Her poems have also been translated into Romanian and Korean. Her reviews of poetry books have appeared in several journals, including Prairie Schooner. Small-McKinney resides in Philadelphia where she teaches community poetry workshops and private students. Read: “Before the World Ends,” “Recurring White Form Against Black” and “Saying it at the Art Museum.”

Judith Sornberger is the author of three full-length poetry collections—I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock, 2019), Practicing the World (CavanKerry, 2018) and Open Heart (Calyx Books)—and five chapbooks. Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas will be published in early December by Shanti Arts. Her prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany is from Shanti Arts. She is a professor emerita of Mansfield University of PA where she taught English and created the Women’s Studies Program. Sornberger lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, PA, among deer, bears and bobcats. Find her on the web at www.judithsornberger.net. Read: “The Recipe Book” and “Young Woman in a Niche with Parrot and a Cage.”

Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have recently been published in Raven Chronicles, Banshee, What Rough Beast, Flatbush Review, and Ekphrastic Review, as well as in the anthologies Chrysanthemum and Ice Cream Poems. Her chapbook, Postcards from the Lilac City, will be published by Finishing Line Press in October, 2020. Read: “The Painter’s Mother Resting.”

Alexandra Umlas is the author of the poetry collection At the Table of the Unknown (Moon Tide Press). She holds an MFA in Poetry from CSU Long Beach. Read: “Mona Lisa.”

Alan Walowitz’s chapbook, Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press.  His full-length book, The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems, is available from Truth Serum Press.  Forthcoming from Arroyo Seco Press is In the Muddle of the Night, a chapbook written with poet Betsy Mars. Read: “Hopper’s Morning in a City.”

Sarah White lives in New York City and divides her time between poetry and painting. Her sixth collection, Iridescent Guest, is appearing this year (2020), thanks to Deerbrook Editions. Read: “The Lewis Chess Queen in the British Museum.”

Martin Willitts Jr has 24 chapbooks including the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, The Wire Fence Holding Back the World (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 20 full-length collections including the Blue Light Award 2019 winner, The Temporary World. His recent book is Unfolding Towards Love (Wipf and Stock, 2020). Read: “Ethereal Flowers.”

Marly Youmans is the author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction. Her most recent collection of poems is The Book of the Red King, a sequence that follows the transforming Fool, the Red King, and the lunar Precious Wentletrap (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019.) Her brand new novel is Charis in the World of Wonders, a young woman's adventurous progress through the dangers, witcheries, and wonders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020.) Read: “The Young Wife’s Reply.”

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