Rilla Askew is the author of
five novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative
nonfiction. She’s a PEN/Faulkner finalist and recipient of
the American Book Award and the Arts and Letters Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays and short stories have appeared
in AGNI, Tin House, World Literature Today, Nimrod, Prize
Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and elsewhere. Askew’s most recent
novel, Prize for the Fire, is about Early Modern English writer
Anne Askew, who was burned as a heretic in 1546.
Paul
Austin’s book Spontaneous Behavior, the Art and Craft of Acting, was
published by Turning Plow Press, in October, 2022. his collection of poetry Notes on Hard Times was published by
Village Books Press. His work has appeared in such publications as This
Land, Sugar Mule, Oklahoma Review, More Monologues by Men, and Newport
Review. His poems have also been included in Speak Your Mind, the
2019 anthology of Woody Guthrie Poets, Bull Buffalo and Indian Paintbrush, an
anthology of Oklahoma poetry, Behind the mask: Haiku in the Time of Covid-19,
Jerry Jazz Musician, and LEVEL Land: poems for and about the I-35
corridor. Late Night Conspiracies, a collection of his writings was
performed with jazz ensemble at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre.
Roy J. Beckemeyer’s fifth book of poetry, The Currency of His Light, has been
accepted for publication by
Turning Plow Press for 2023. His 4th book, Mouth
Brimming Over (2019) was published by Blue Cedar Press. Stage Whispers (2018, Meadowlark) won
the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (2018, Spartan Press) contains
ekphrastic poems inspired by artists’ depictions of angels. Music I Once Could Dance To (2014, Coal City) was a 2015 Kansas Notable
Book. Beckemeyer’s work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net
Awards, and has won Best Small Fiction. He has designed and built airplanes,
discovered and named fossils of Palaeozoic insect species, and has traveled the
world. Beckemeyer lives with and for his wife of 60 years, Pat, in Wichita,
Kansas. His Authors Page is at royjbeckemeyer.com.
Alan
Berecka – Since he
was in Ada last, has had a damn good year. His most recent book A Living is not a Life: A Working Title was named a finalist in the Hofer Award. He’s
had several poems posted on the Texas
Poetry Assignment and snuck into their print anthology. He was published in
the Windward and Langdon Review, and read at the Poezijos pavasaris, the Lithuanian
Writers Unions Spring Festival held in Vilnius and other cities and towns
around Lithuania. But the greatest thing to happen in the last year is that he
retired from working as an academic librarian.
Alan Birkelbach, a Texas native, is the 2005 Texas
Poet Laureate. He is a member of the Texas
Institute of Letters, Western Writers of America, National Park Foundation, and
The Academy of American Poets. He is a
Spur Award Winner, two-time international Indie Book Award Finalist, winner of
North Texas Book Festival Award, Pushcart Prize Nominee, editor for several
editions of the TCU Press Texas Poet Laureate Series, winner of the Pat
Stodghill Book Publication Award and winner of the Edwin M. Eakin Memorial Book
Publication Award. His twelfth book is The National Parks: A Century of Grace, with fellow Texas Poet
Laureate karla k. morton. is due out from TCU Press in November of 2020. They visited all 62 National Parks, wrote
poetry and took photos, with a percentage of the sales from the forthcoming book
going back to the Parks System. This is
to help culturally preserve our greatest treasures – our National Parks for the
next 100 years.
Joey Brown is a poet and a fiction writer.
She has authored two poetry collections: The Feral Love Poems (Hungry
Buzzard Press) and Oklahomaography (Mongrel
Empire Press). Her poems and prose have appeared in The Red Earth Review, Plainsong, Concho River Review, The Langdon
Review of the Arts in Texas, Tulsa
Review, Oklahoma Review, The San Pedro River Review, and other journals.
She has recently completed two new manuscripts – a book length narrative poem
set in early-80s oil bust Oklahoma and a mystery novel – for which she is
seeking publishers. She frequently performs her poetry at festivals and writing
conferences around the Midwest and sometimes beyond. Joey now lives in
southwest Missouri with her husband, the novelist Michael Howarth, and spends
her free time making amateur art, watching British tv shows, and dreaming about
retiring from her day job.
Nathan Brown is an author,
songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a PhD
in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma where he’s taught for
over 20 years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14,
and now travels fulltime performing readings, concerts, workshops and speaking
on creativity, poetry, and songwriting. Nathan has published 25 books. Most recent
is his new collection of poems, In the
Days of Our Resilience, the fourth in a series now known as the
Pandemic Poems Project, a collection of commissioned poems that deal with the
days of the pandemic, and a new travel memoir Just
Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large. Karma Crisis: New and
Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the> Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier
book, Two Tables Over, won
the Oklahoma Book Award.
Corbett Buchly’s poems have appeared in 17
journals, including SLAB, Rio Grande
Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Barrow Street. He is an alumnus of
Texas Christian University and the professional writing program at the
University of Southern California. He currently resides in Northeast Texas with
his wife and two children. You can find him online at buchly.com.
Tina Carlson is a NM poet. She has published
two previous collections of poems: Ground,
Wind, This Body (UNM Press, 2017) and, in collaboration
with two other NM poets, We Are Meant To
Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 NM/AZ Poetry
Anthology prize. Her third collection, A
Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery is forthcoming
in fall 2023 from UNM Press. She won second place in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts 2020 Joy Harjo Poetry Contest.
In her former life as a professor of medieval
and early modern English literature and creative writing, Julie Chappell published six books of scholarship; a collection of
her original poetry, Faultlines (Village
Books Press, 2013); and other writings. Her poetry and prose have appeared in a
number of anthologies and journals including Cybersoleil: A Literary
Journal; Malpaïs Review; Voices de la Luna; Concho River Review; Stone
Renga; Speak Your Mind: Woody Guthrie Poets Celebrate Freedom of
Speech 2019; and Bull Buffalo and Indian Paintbrush (The Poetry of
Oklahoma). She has also read her work widely in a variety of venues from
California to Virginia and places in between. In 1994, she was the Grand Slam
Poetry prize winner in Lawrence, Kansas. Since retiring in 2018, she has
published two more collections of poetry, Mad Habits of a Life (Lamar
University Literary Press, 2019) and As I Pirouette Away (Turning
Plow Press, 2021). Her second collection, Mad Habits of a Life was
nominated for the Paterson Prize in 2020. She also has two collections of
original short stories, Homecoming and Other Mythic Tales (Fine
Dog Press, 2021) and Contrary Qualities of Elements (Fine Dog
Press, 2023).
Marc DiPaolo is
an Associate Professor of English at Southwestern Oklahoma State University and
Secretary for the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the
United States. He has written the ethnic autobiography Fake Italian (2021),
and the nonfiction books Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the
Inklings to Game of Thrones (2018), Emma
Adapted: Jane Austen’s Heroine from Book to Film (2007) and War,
Politics, and Superheroes (CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2011). He
has also edited and co-edited book collections of essays about film directors
Ozu and Mike Leigh, and on religion in American culture. He has been
interviewed on NPR, BBC4, and in the documentaries Geek and You Shall
Find (2019) and Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics (s1e4,
2017).
Richard Dixon is a retired high-school Special
Education teacher and tennis coach. His poems and essays have been published in
literary journals, and he has been a featured reader many times. 2017 saw the
publication of an extended chapbook, Leaving
Home.
Wendy Dunmeyer loves poetry, wildflowers, and
watercolor painting. Her poetry has been selected as a finalist for the Morton
Marr Poetry Prize; received honorable mention in NDSU’s Poetry of the Plains
and Prairies Chapbook Contest; and has been published in Measure, Natural Bridge, The
Oklahoma Review, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection, My
Grandmother’s Last Letter, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary
Press. To encourage future generations of poetry lovers and young poets, she
has taught poetry classes for children at her local library and volunteered as
a visiting writer for National Poetry Month at local elementary schools.
Woodstok Farley is a former beach bum from South
Florida living on the edge of West Texas. Now instead of waves, reefs, and
cypress-filled swamps, he lives on land full of mesquite, cactus, and a
longhorn named Tip. He also shares the land with his beautiful bride of 40+
years, a dog named Tallahassee, and a cat who comes when you whistle. Woodstok
says he’s been writing all his life; it’s just that he used to do it with a
paintbrush and a canvas. Telling crazy stories of beaches, swamps, and life on
the road, his friends said he should write this stuff down. So he did. The
result was his first collection entitled As the Wave Rose: Florida Tales and
Other Wandering Stories, published by Fine Dog Press. His second
collection, also by Fine Dog Press, tells of his wanderings among the hills of
Oklahoma entitled, The Water Stop Saloon: More Wandering Tales. Currently,
Woodstok is working on a noir novel set in his hometown entitled Murder at
the Pennsylvania Hotel.
Alan Gann facilitates after-school
programming and writing workshops for under-served youth for which he wrote
DaVerse Works, a performance poetry curriculum. Multiple Pushcart and
Best-of-the-Net nominee, Alan is the author of three volumes of poetry: Better Ways to See (Assure Press), That’s Entertainment (Lamar University
Literary Press), and Adventures of the
Clumsy Juggler (Ink Brush Press). His nonexistent spare time is spent bird
watching, biking and otherwise enjoying the outdoors.
Inspired equally by her upbringing on the plains
of Oklahoma and time spent exploring the high desert of New Mexico, Ky George uses essay, fiction, and
poetry to explore the intimate relationships between the land and its people.
Ky is a graduate of the Red Earth MFA and has had work published in The
Oklahoma Review, Insurrection, and Lesbians are
Miracles.
Andrew Geyer’s tenth book is the composite
anthology Magic, Mystery, Madness:
electric ekphrastics (Angelina River Press 2022). A member of
the Texas Institute of Letters and the South Carolina Academy of Authors
Literary Hall of Fame, Geyer currently serves as English Department Chair at
the University of South Carolina Aiken and as fiction editor for Concho River Review.
Aaron Glover’s poetry has previously appeared in Thimble Literary
Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Mad Swirl, Illya’s
Honey, the Red River Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook Bio
Logic (2017) was published through INF Press. From 2011-2016, he was
on faculty in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M
University. As a performer and director, he worked throughout Texas and the
Great Plains. He holds an MFA from the University of Houston, and currently
lives in Dallas, TX.
Lyman Grant lives
in the Shenandoah Valley. For four and a half decades, he taught at Austin
Community College and served in various administrative roles including Dean of
Arts and Humanities. He is the editor of New Growth: Contemporary Short
Fiction from Texas, Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary, and The
Letters of Roy Bedichek. He served as book review editor of The
Texas Humanist and fiction editor for Brazos River Review and
published essays and reviews in Texas Observer, Texas Books in Review,
The Langdon Review, Creative Pulse, and Dallas Morning News.
With John Lee and Sharon Adams, he founded and edited MAN!, a quarterly
magazine devoted to men’s issues. His poems have appeared in numerous journals
and anthologies and in several volumes of poetry. In 2023, he will publish two
new books Symptom and Desire: New and Selected Poems and Ostraca (a
volume of Golden Shovel poems). He is married and the father of
three sons.
Joshua Grasso is a Professor
of English at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, where he has been
teaching everything from Batman to Beowulf for the last 15 years. He has a PhD
in 18th century English lit from Miami University, and an MA from the
University of Tulsa. His science fiction and fantasy stories have
recently appeared in Cosmic Roots and
Eldritch Shores, Metaphorosis, Allegory,
and the Creepy and Tales to Terrify
podcasts. His most recently published story, "Emissary," will be
featured in a benefit anthology to support victims of the Russian aggression
against Ukraine.
Bill Hagen retired from Oklahoma Baptist
University in 2012, where he taught courses in Western Civilization, fiction,
film, and drama for 38 years. He has
published articles on Joseph Conrad, Malcolm Lowry, detective fiction, silent
Westerns, film adaption, and regularly reviews for World Literature
Today. Dr.
Hagen has been involved in the Let’s Talk About It programs since the mid-1980s
and presently serves on the state FOLIO (Friends of Libraries in Oklahoma)
board.
Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years. She has published four
books: Under a Lone Star (Village Books Press,
2017), So Long As We Speak Their
Names (Kelsay Books, 2019), Painting
the Pinwheel Sky (Assure
Press, 2020), and Cattlemen &
Cadillacs -- as editor (Dallas Poets Community Press, 2017). Chapbooks
include: Black Crow in Flight,
Editor’s Choice in Main Street Rag’s 2007 competition and Softly Beating Wings, 2017 William D.
Barney Chapbook Competition winner (Blackbead Books). Her work appears widely
in small press and university publications including Plainsongs, Schuylkill Valley
Journal, Borderlands, Concho River Review, Santa Fe Literary Review,
Switchgrass, and San Pedro River Review. She is a
multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.
Now retired after working thirty years as a
hospice RN, Maryann Hurtt now has
the energy to explore and write. She comes from a family of storytellers and
her poetry reflects a wish for “one more story.” Once Upon a Tar Creek:
Mining for Voices (Turning Plow Press) came out in 2021. Recent
work has been or will soon to be published in Writing in a Woman’s
Voice, Moss Piglet, Gyroscope Review, Snapdragon, Verse-Virtual, and Oklahoma
Humanities. Her poem. ”at six weeks” received a Pushcart nomination in
2022.
Markham Johnson's book of poetry, Dear Dreamland, was published in 2022 by
Lamar University Literary Press. Of this book, Roger Weingarten said
"Johnson weaves a midwestern web around his childhood, the 1921 Tulsa Race
Massacre, and 'an okie/ on a back porch mulling obsession/ and a half bottle of
Lone Star.' " Johnson won the Pablo Neruda Prize, and his first book, Collecting the Light, was
chosen for the University of Central Florida's Contemporary Poetry Series. His
chapbook, Grackles, Redwings, Starlings, was selected
for publication by Philip Levine.
Living
what could be charitably called a nomadic life, Paul Juhasz was born in western New Jersey, grew up just outside
New Haven, Connecticut, and has spent appreciable chunks of his life in the
plains of central Illinois, in the upper hill country of Texas, and in the
Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. Most recently seduced by the spirit of the red
earth, he now lives in Oklahoma City. A graduate of the Red Earth M.F.A., his
work has appeared in several literary journals, most recently Concho River
Review, Poetry Quarterly, Oklahoma Review and Main Street Rag. He
has been serving as curator and coordinator of the Woody Guthrie Poets since
2020. His first book, Fulfillment: Diary of a Warehouse Picker—a
mock journal covering his six-month stint in an Amazon warehouse—was published
by Fine Dog Press in 2020. His second book, Ronin, a collection of
(mostly) prose poems—also published by Fine Dog Press—was named a finalist for
the 2022 Oklahoma Book Award in poetry. His second collection of poetry, The
Inner Life of Comics, was published by Turning Plow Press in the fall of
2022.
Patrick
Kindig is assistant professor of English at Tarleton State University.
He is the author of the chapbook all the catholic gods (Seven
Kitchens Press 2019) and the micro-chapbook Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press 2016), and his poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, the Cincinnati
Review, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, and other
journals.
Chloe LaFevers is a graduate student currently
enrolled in Oklahoma City University’s Red Earth MFA program. A graduate of
East Central University, she acted as an editor for the 2022 edition of Originals, ECU’s annual literary
journal, in which she also had several works featured. She placed third in both
the Scissortail Festival’s 2022 Undergraduate Creative Writing Contest and East
Central University’s annual Paul Hughes Memorial Writing Award in 2022.
Sharon Edge Martin has been published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Family Circle, Malpais Review, Oklahoma Today, Oklahoma Humanities, Outside, True West,
and in three Wood Guthrie Anthologies. Her work is included in Michael Bugeja’s
The Art and Craft of Poetry, in Bull Buffalo and Indian Paintbrush, edited by Ron Wallace, and
in Level Land, edited by Craig Hill
and Todd Fuller. She writes for the Oklahoma
Observer and is the author of two
books from Village Books Press, Not a
Prodigal and I’ve Got the Blues: Looking for Justice in a Red State.
Bill McCloud is an associate poetry editor for
the Right Hand Pointing literary journal and is the poetry reviewer
for Vietnam Veterans of America. His poetry book, The Smell of the Light (Balkan Press), reached
#1 on The Oklahoman’s “Oklahoma
Bestsellers” list. His poems have appeared in Oklahoma Today and the Oklahoma English Journal, are taught in classes at the University
School of Milwaukee, WI, discussed in a Creative Writing class at the
University of Tulsa, and read by cadets in an English class at the Air Force
Academy. He is a faculty member of William Bernhardt’s WriterCon, presenting
sessions on writing and publishing poetry. Bernhardt’s Balkan Press will be
publishing McCloud’s second full-length poetry book, A Common Little Hurt
A
Pushcart honoree, with a personal essay in Pushcart Prize XLII, David Meischen is the author of Anyone’s Son, winner of the John A.
Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas
Institute
of Letters (TIL). Nopalito: Stories
is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. David has twice
received the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from TIL, most recently
for “Crossing at the Light,” lead story in The
Distance Between Here and Elsewhere:
Three Stories (Storylandia, Summer 2020). His work has appeared in The Common, Copper Nickel, The Evansville Review, Salamander, Southern Poetry Review,
The Southern Review, Valparaiso
Fiction Review, and elsewhere. A former juror for the Kimmel Harding Nelson
center for the arts, David completed a 2018 writing residency at Jentel Arts.
Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, he lives in Albuquerque, NM
with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.
A
graduate of St. John's College and of the George Mason University MFA Program, Gary Worth Moody has worked as a forest
fire fighter, a farrier, a cowboy, and building a town for coal miners in
Siberia’s Kuzbass Region. His poems have appeared in myriad journals on both
sides of the Atlantic, and in the anthologies, Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin, 1984-2001 (Word Works
Press) and Weaving the Terrain (Dos
Gatos Press). He is the author of Hazards
of Grace (Red Mountain Press, 2012); Occoquan
(Red Mountain Press, 2015) shortlisted for the international Rubery Book
Award in poetry; and The Burnings (3:
A Taos Press, 2019), co-winner of the New Mexico / Arizona Book Award. He is
currently in the final assembly of a 4th manuscript with working Cartography of Random Graves Antlered with
Unfamiliar Desert Bird. A falconer, Gary lives in Santa Fe with the artist
and writer, Oriana Rodman, Handsome, the cinnamon Dachshund, Beauty, a grulla
hound of indeterminant genetic origin and, if health and luck hold, a
Ferruginous or Red-tail hawk this coming autumn.
John
Graves Morris has attempted to commit poems for nearly fifty
years because he can't quite escape the sneaking suspicion that someday he
might be good at that endeavor, a notion that, among other things, has kept him
from retiring. He has one published collection, Noise and Stories,
and an unpublished one, The County Seat of Wanting So Many Things,
and one of the many things he wants is to find a publisher for it. His
poems have appeared in The Chariton Review, The Concho River Review,
The Red Earth Review, The Red River Review, Jelly Bucket, Big Muddy, and
others. He teaches at Cameron University, which so far seen fit not to
kick him out, and lives in Lawton with Janie Lytle.
karla k. morton has fifteen books, and is
nominated for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. Her The National Parks: A Century of Grace is historic: there’s never
been another poetry book written in-situ from each of the 62 American National
Parks to help culturally preserve and protect these sacred spaces for the next
seven generations. Morton and fellow Poet Laureate and co-writer/explorer Alan Birkelbach
give a percentage of their royalties from the book back to the National Parks.
Her most recent poetry book Politics of
the Minotaur won First Place in Poetry in the Firebird Book Award, won the
Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and is short-listed for the
International Rubery Book Award. Her work has been published by such journals
as American Life in Poetry, Alaska
Quarterly Review, Southword, Atlanta Review, Arkansas Review, descant, Boulevard,
Comstock Review, Lascaux Review, Grub Street and New Ohio Review. An avid conservationist, Morton is a Quixote: the
word she coined meaning a person with the seemingly impossible dream of
visiting all their country’s National Parks. She was named Texas Poet Laureate
in 2010.
Christopher Murphy received his MFA from The
University of Arkansas and teaches creative writing at Northeastern State
University. He serves on the board for the Nimrod International Journal and the
Oklahoma Humanities Council. His work has been published at Gulf Coast, This Land, Jellyfish Review,
Necessary Fiction, and decomP among others. He has a
collection of flash fiction, Burning
All the Time, from Mongrel Empire Press.
Tom Murphy was the
2021-2022 Corpus Christi Poet Laureate and the Langdon Review’s
2022 Writer-In-Residence. Murphy’s books: When I Wear Bob Kaufman’s
Eyes (2022) from Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Snake Woman
Moon (2021), Pearl (2020), American
History (2017), and co-edited Stone Renga (2017) with
Alan Berecka. He’s been published widely in literary journals and anthologies
such as: Poetry is DEAD: An Inclusive Anthology of Deadhead Poetry, Boundless, Concho
River Review, MONO, Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology, Odes and
Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast, Wine Anthology, The Great
American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, Red River Review, Switchgrass Review,
Windward Review, Corpus Christi Writers Anthologies, Voice de la Luna, WordFest
Anthology, Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a Post 9/11 World among
other publications. Recently retired from Texas A&M University-Corpus
Christi, he still works with the Barrio Writers and the People’s Poetry
Festival. Contact information, books or bookings tom@tommurphywriter.com, or https://tommurphywriter.com .
Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of
the State of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry: The Family Book of Martyrs (Lamar
University Press, 2022), Black Sunday (Lamar
University Press, 2018), Lapse Americana
(New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy
for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in The Yale Review, Image, Rattle, The Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter and
many other literary journals. He has been honored with an Oklahoma Book Award
for Poetry and with a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers
Conference. Myers is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature at Oklahoma
Baptist University, where he teaches creative writing and English literature
and directs the great books honors program. His first book of non-fiction, A Poetics of Orthodoxy, was recently
published by Cascade Books.
Neal Ostman’s poetry has appeared in various
journals, anthologies and e-zines, including: artsDFW guide; Cattlemen
& Cadillacs; ComradesUK.com; Electric Acorn, Dublin, Ireland; The Fort Worth Poet; Lotuseaters.net; Lllya’s Honey; New Texas 2001; Pierian Springs;
Poems Niederngasse; Poetry Pacific; Red River Review, Under the Streets and
Bridges, WordFest Anthology 2022, and Wired
Art from Wired Hearts. His poetry readings have been
well received at many venues in Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, and other cities in
his travels. Neal has taught writing and poetry seminars at the OU Short Course
on Professional Writing and Texas Writers’ Conferences, respectively. In
addition to poetry, his
published credits include humor and op-ed columns, and business articles. Neal
is a member of the Dallas Poets Community and The Poetry Society of Texas. He
lives in Colleyville, Texas.
Steven
M. Pedersen,
PhD, is a scholar in rhetoric, composition, and technical writing. His work has
appeared in Rhetoric Review, The Journal of the Kenneth
Burke Society, Journal of American Studies Association of Texas,
and The Oklahoman. He is also an aspiring poet with a manuscript in
development entitled, Dog Days. He
currently teaches at East Central University as an Assistant Professor in the
English and Languages Department.
Brady Peterson has lived in
Belton, Texas for the past 37 years. There he taught rhetoric, built houses,
helped raise five daughters, and wrote poetry. He is the author of Glued
to the Earth, Between Stations, Dust, From an Upstairs Window, and From
the Edge of Town.
Keely Record lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Received
an MFA from the Red Earth Creative Writing MFA program at Oklahoma City
University. She serves on the editorial board of Nimrod International
Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Atlas
Poetica and Bamboo Hut.
Linda Neal Reising, a native of Oklahoma and a member
of the Cherokee Nation, has been published in numerous journals, including The Southern Indiana Review, Comstock Review,
and Nimrod. Reising’s work has also
appeared in a number of anthologies, including Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (Harper/Collins) and And
Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana
(Indiana Historical Society Press). She was named the winner of the 2012 Writer’s Digest Poetry Competition. Her
chapbook, Re-Writing Family History
(Finishing Line Press), was a finalist for the 2015 Oklahoma Book Award, as
well as winner of the 2015 Oklahoma Writers’ Federation Poetry Book Prize. In
2018, her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editors of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt
Vonnegut Museum & Library. Kelsay Books
nominated her poem “Emmaline” for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. The Keeping, her first full-length book
of poetry published by Finishing Line Press in 2020, won the Kops-Fetherling Phoenix
Award for Best New Voice in Poetry. Her second full-length collection, Stone Roses, which was published by
Kelsay Books in 2021, was finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, the Spur
Award, and the WILLA Award. Stone Roses
won the Eric Hoffer Award and the Western Heritage
Wrangler Book Award.
Sally Rhoades was the feature at Third Thursday this past September hosted
by Dan Wilcox. She was interviewed by Andrea Cunliffe for the Hudson Mohawk magazine at WOOC105.3 FM,
a Sanctuary for Independent Media. She has been featured in Poetry Spoken Here, a podcast directed
by interviewer/poet Charlie Rossiter. Her poetry has appeared in Misfit Magazine, Dragon Poetry Review, 2,
Elegant Rage, a poetic tribute honoring the centennial of Woody Gutherie, the
Highwatermark Salo[o]n performance series by Stockpot flats, Up the River and in Peerglass, an
anthology of Hudson Valley peer groups. She received her Masters of Arts in
English in 1995 at the University of Albany.
Rob Roensch is the author of the
story collection The Wildflowers of
Baltimore (Salt, 2012), the short novel The
World and the Zoo (Outpost19, 2020), and the novel In the Morning, the City is the Prairie (forthcoming from Belle
Point Press). He teaches at Oklahoma City University.
Molly
Sizer
is a retired rural sociologist living in southwest Oklahoma. She spends a lot
of time walking in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, and occasionally
writes poetry. She’s presented her words to Lawton’s Third Saturday readings,
Duncan’s Reading Down the Plains, the Woody Guthrie Poetry Readings (2018,
2022) and the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. (2019, 2022) Her work has been published in Westview and The Oklahoma Review.
Don Stinson is the author of two poetry collections—
Flatline Horizon (Mongrel Empire Press, 2018), and
Hunger (Turning Plow Press, 2020), which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. His third book, tentatively titled
Dark Rooms in Silent Houses, will be published in the summer of 2023 by Turning Plow Press. Individual poems have appeared in
Concho River Review,
Southwestern American Literature,
Loonfeather, and other print and online publications. A graduate of Oklahoma State University’s graduate creative writing program, Stinson has taught at Northeastern State University, OSU, and Ridgewater College in Minnesota. He is retiring June 1 after 24 years at Northern Oklahoma College, where he taught on all three NOC campuses (Tonkawa, Enid, and Stillwater), and—with Brandon Hobson and Paul Bowers, co-founded the Chikaskia Literary Festival.
Denise Tolan's work has been included in places
such as The Best Small Fictions, The Best Short Stories from The
Saturday Evening Post, Blue Mountain Review, Atlas and
Alice, and Lunch Ticket. Denise was a finalist for Best of
the Net 2022 and for the International Literary Awards: Penelope Niven Prize in
Nonfiction, as well as the Diane Wood’s Memorial Award for Nonfiction. Her
memoir, Italian Blood, is scheduled for release with CavanKerry
Press in fall 2023.
Ron Wallace is an Oklahoma native and
currently an adjunct instructor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State
University, in Durant, Oklahoma. He is the author of ten books of poetry, five
of which have been finalists in the Oklahoma Book Awards. Renegade and Other Poems was the 2018 winner of the Oklahoma Book
Award. Wallace has been a “Pushcart Prize” nominee and has recently been
published in Oklahoma Today, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review,
Borderlands and a number of other magazines and journals. He also edited Bull Buffalo and Indian Paintbrush, a
collection of Oklahoma Poetry and completed his first novel, A Secret Lies
in New Orleans, a finalist in fiction in the 2022 Oklahoma Book Awards.
Mark Walling is a professor in the department
of English at East Central University. Among many other things, he sponsors Originals, the ECU student journal of
creative writing, and serves as the judge for short fiction for the annual
Fisher high school contest, a state-wide contest. His short fiction has been
published in several leading journals.
Sarah Webb is the former poetry editor
of Crosstimbers, an
interdisciplinary journal from the University of Science and Arts of
Oklahoma. Her poetry collections Red
Riding Hood's Sister (virtual artists collective, 2018) and Black (virtual artists collective,
2013) were finalists for the Oklahoma Book Award and Black for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award. She is a
co-editor for the Zen arts magazine Just
This and co-leader of an ongoing writing group for Zen and
Writing.
Cullen Whisenhunt is a graduate of Oklahoma City
University's Red Earth Creative Writing MFA program. His work has appeared in Dragon Poet's Review, The Ekphrastic Review,
and The Bamboo Hut, among other
journals. His debut chapbook of poetry, Among
the Trees, was published by Fine Dog Press in 2021, and he has a chapbook
of experimental poetry, Childish Thing
and Other Experiments, forthcoming from Fine Dog Press. He currently
teaches English at Eastern Oklahoma State College in McAlester, OK, where he
conducts writing workshops with the McAlester Public Library Poetry Club. He
also co-hosts (with Ron Wallace) monthly Poetry on Lost Street readings in
Durant, OK.
Robert Wynne earned his MFA in Creative Writing
from Antioch University. A former co-editor of Cider Press Review, he has published 6 chapbooks, and 3 full-length
books of poetry, the most recent being Self-Portrait
as Odysseus, published in 2011 by Tebot Bach Press. He’s won numerous
prizes, and his poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies throughout
North America. He lives in Burleson, TX with his wife and a lively German
Shepherd. His online home is www.rwynne.com.
Zhenya Yevtushenko is one of the sons of Maria and
Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Zhenya likes to claim that he is pursuing his
undergraduate degrees in English, Political Science, and History whenever he
isn't going on walks with his little dog. His works and translations
have appeared in Suburban Witchcraft Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, The Tulsa
Review, and The Guardian. He
owes his inspiration to his mother, his brothers, and to the love of his life,
Olivia.
John M. Yozzo is a retired professor of English
and a retired farmhand, residing in Tulsa OK.
A native of Ponca City OK he is sprung from a large Catholic family, is
a proud product of strict parochial schools, and
holds 3 degrees from the University of Tulsa. Yozzo taught at TU, the
University of Alabama in Birmingham and at
East Central U in Ada OK a total of 34 years. Yozzo has published in Concho
River Review, Arcadia, and Malpais, as well as Ain’t Gonna Be
Treated This Way and Oklahoma Poems and Their Poets. Yozzo
has published two collections of poems with Village Books Press, Only
Wonder (2017) and Echoes and Omens (2019). He has, after 50 years of writing,
manuscripts for many more.
