Bill Abbott,  originally from Tennessee, has been involved in Poetry Slam since 1992 and is the author of Let Them Eat MoonPie, the history of poetry slam in the Southeast. He has attended regional and national competitions, hosted three regional events, is credited with creating the Rust Belt Regional events, and organized and hosted poetry events across multiple cities and states. He has been published in Ray’s Road Review, Radius, The November 3rd Club, Flypaper Magazine, Jokes Review, The Broken Plate, Ghost City Review, and The Sow’s Ear. Having earned his MFA from Miami University in 2018, Mr. Abbott lives in Ohio and teaches creative writing at Central State University. His website is billabbottpoet.com.

Susana H. Case is the author of six books of poetry. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of four chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Her work has appeared in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, RHINO and many other journals. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. Her website is https://susanahcase.com

Joan Kwon Glass is the biracial, Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest, & is author of two chapbooks: HOW TO MAKE PANCAKES FOR A DEAD BOY (Harbor Editions) & the micro-chapbook BLOODLINE (Harbor Review). She is a proud Smith College graduate & has been a public school educator for 20 years. Her poems have appeared in Diode, Rattle, The Rupture, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Night Heron Barks, Sweet Tree Review & many others & have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Sundress Anthology Best of the Net. She grew up in Michigan & South Korea & lives in Connecticut with her family.

Rebecca Griswold lives in Cincinnati where she owns and operates White Whale Tattoo alongside her husband. The Attic Bedroom is her debut collection of poems. Her poems have most recently appeared in Cimarron Review, Revolute, Softblow, Autofocus, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. 

Melanie Hyo-In Han, born in Korea and raised in East Africa,  recently moved from the U.S. to the U.K., where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing, the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Flora Fiction, and the Two Languages Prize Editor at Gasher Press. She is the author of Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and the translator of several collections of Spanish poetry (Hebel Ediciones). Nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Han has received awards from “Boston in 100 Words,” Valiant Scribe, The Lyric Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry and Translation, an M.Ed. in Secondary English and Spanish, and a B.A. in English, Spanish, and Linguistics. Learn more about her at melaniehan.com.

Kim Jacobs-Beck grew up in metro Detroit and now lives in Ohio. She is the author of a chapbook, Torch (Wolfson Press). Her poems can be found in Museum of Americana, Great Lakes Review, West Trestle Review, Apple Valley Review, and SWWIM, among others. She has reviewed poetry collections for Muzzle Magazine, Fence/Constant Critic, Southern Indiana Review, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Crab Creek Review and others. She teaches at the University of Cincinnati Clermont and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Milk & Cake Press.

AKaiser’s poems and photos can be found or are forthcoming in Amsterdam Quarterly, Lavender Review, Manzano Mountain Review, Mudfish, and The Rumpus. She is the Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize winner (2017) and has placed in the North American Review James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Journal Prize, the Wasafiri NewWriting Prize, Eggtooth Editions Chapbook Contest, and elsewhere. She is a Sweet Action Poetry Collective member. AKaiser has degrees in poetry, political science, and a doctorate from the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona on first translations of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Catalan, French & Spanish, with emphasis on Catalan translator and transatlantic democrat, city-garden advocate Cebrià Montoliu, whose biography she is writing. Her website is https://akexperiments.org

Leah Claire Kaminski‘s poems appear in Bennington Review, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, The Rumpus, and Zyzzyva. Her poems have received honors including the C.D. Wright Emerging Poets’ Prize, Grand Prize in the Summer Literary Seminars Fiction & Poetry Contest, and runner up for the Cutbank Patricia Goedicke Prize. She is the author of chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Harbor Editions, and Milk & Cake Press. Poetry Editor at The Dodge and Editorial Assistant at Seneca Review, Leah received her MFA from UC Irvine and now lives in Chicago. Find out more at www.leahkaminski.com.

J.I. (Judy) Kleinberg is an artist, poet, freelance writer, and three-time Pushcart nominee. Her poetry has appeared in print and online journals and anthologies worldwide. In addition to Sleeping Lessons (Milk & Cake Press, 2025), her chapbooks include The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap Press, 2023), How to pronounce the wind(Paper View Press, 2023), and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23, 2023). A full-length volume of visual poems, She needs the river (Poem Atlas) was published in 2024. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg.

Don Krieger is a biomedical researcher whose focus is the electric activity within
the brain. He is author of the 2020 hybrid collection, “Discovery” (Cyberwit), a 2020 Pushcart nominee, and a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science-as-Story Fellow. His work has appeared in American Journal of Nursing, Neurology, Seneca Review, The Asahi Shimbun, The Blue Nib, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and others, and has been translated into Farsi, Greek, Italian, German, and Turkish.

Nicole Kurlich is a writer, amateur seamster, and Hellraiser enthusiast currently living in Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in a handful of journals, most recently in Poet Lore.

Megan Leonard lives and works on the New Hampshire seacoast. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Mom Egg Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Transom, the Bellevue Literary Review, and Sharkpack Annual; she is the recipient of the Prospero Prize and the Puerto Del Sol Prize. Meg’s digital micro-chap, where the body ends, is available through Platypus Press. book of lullabies is her first full-length collection. Her website is https://www.meganleonardpoetry.com

Megan Mary Moore is a poet working in Cincinnati, Ohio and living in a fairy princess fever dream. She is the author of two full length collections, Dwellers (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and To Daughter a Devil (Unsolicited Press, 2023). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Miami University and writes about the gorgeous and sometimes horrifying terrain of the feminine body. 

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including She May Be a Saint (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly, 2018.) She writes extensively on popular culture, with poems and essays appearing in Menacing Hedge, Yes, Poetry, Thirteen Myna Birds, and the Twin Peaks poetry anthology, These Poems Are Not What They Seem(Apep Publications, 2020.)

Yamini Pathak is a former software engineer, born and raised in India. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Waxwing, Anomaly, The Kenyon Review blog, The Hindu newspaper, and elsewhere. Her poems are forthcoming in Rise Like a Wave: Anthology of poems by Asian-American women poets, edited by Alycia Pirmohamed and Christine Kitano. A Dodge Foundation Poet in the Schools, she is poetry editor for Inch magazine (Bull City Press) and an MFA candidate at Antioch University, LA. Yamini is an alumnus of VONA/Voices (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation), and Community of Writers. She lives in New Jersey with her family. 

Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and now is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College. She has three chapbooks of poetry, and her first full length book, Helen of Bikini, is forthcoming in 2023 from Lily Poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Phoebe, Grist, Forklift OH, and The Chattahoochee Review.

Dena Rod is a non-binary poet whose work has been highlighted in My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, Butter Press, and Imagoes: A Queer Anthology. In 2020, Dena toured with Sister Spit, debuted the chapbook swallow a beginning, and joined The Rumpus‘s features team. A fellow of Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writer’s Lab, Dena writes to illuminate their experiences in the Iranian American diaspora and queer communities through creative nonfiction essays and poetry. Connect with Dena on Twitter/Instagram: @alightningrod or at their website, denarod.com.

Erin Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is the Executive Director of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020). Her work has appearedin Guernica, Ecotone, CrabOrchard, and Mid-American and has received support from the Academy of American Poets. Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the Poet Laureate of Oak Ridge, TN.

Alison Strub is a biracial Indian American brown girl, who resides in Virginia and studies Y2K. She is a hybrid poet and visual artist who received her MFA at George Mason University. Her poems have appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Salt Hill, The Seattle Review, Word For/Word and other fine publications. Her chapbook, Lillian, Fred, was published by BOAAT Press. She can be reached by telegrams and texts.

Joanna Thomas is both poet and visual artist, residing in the small university town of Ellensburg, Washington. Her poems have appeared in the journals Found Poetry Review, petrichor, OTOLITHS, and Picture Sentence, as well as several anthologies; and her erasures, collages, and one-of-a-kind artist books have been exhibited in galleries across the nation. Her chapbooks include rabbit: an erasure poem and cuddle fluttering my feather heart. She likes to read first drafts to the dog, and when he says no, no, no, you gotta sigh like a goose, honk like a duck, quack like a bunny, she revises. Her website is https://www.joannathomas.xyz

Dameion Wagner lives and works in Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in Columbus Creative Cooperative’s Anthology The Ides of March, Shot Glass Journal, Crab Creek Review, Ohio Poetry Association’s Common Threads, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Gordian Review, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Tilde: A Literary Journal, and most recently in Cider Press Review. His reviews appear in Heavy Feather Review, The Rumpus, and The Adroit Journal. He won Miami University’s 2017 Jordan- Goodman Poetry Prize and is a 2018 recipient of the Academy of American Poets University Prize. (“Momma’s Boy,” poets.org). Bird Wild is his first full-length collection. He earned his MFA from Miami University’s Low Res Program.

Marcus Whalbring is the author of A Concert of Rivers from Milk & Cake Press, as well as How to Draw Fire from Finishing Line Press and Just Flowers from Crooked Steeple Press. A graduate of the MFA program at Miami University, his poems and stories have appeared in The Cortland Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Spry, Strange Horizons, Abyss & Apex, Spaceports and Spidersilk, and Underwood Press, among others. He’s a high school teacher, a father, and a husband. You can connect with him via twitter at https://twitter.com/marcuswhalbring and learn more about his work at https://marcuswhalbring.wpcomstaging.com/poetry/.

Angelique Zobitz (she/her/hers) is the author of the chapbook Love Letters to The Revolution from American Poetry Journal and the forthcoming chapbook Burn Down Your House from Milk & Cake Press. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, 2021 and 2020 Best New Poets nominee, Spring 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition Finalist, and a five-time Best of the Net nominee. Her work appears in The Journal, Sugar House Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora, Yemassee, The Adirondack Review and many others. She is a poetry editor of The Night Heron Barksand Ran Off with the Star Bassoon. Luna Luna Magazine named her one of ‘5 Poets of Color to watch in 2021′ alongside Chen Chen and Amanda Gorman. She can be found at www.angeliquezobitz.com and on Twitter and Instagram: @angeliquezobitz