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FRANCESCA BELL
Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound, and the translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, all from Red Hen Press. Her work appears in ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rattle. She is the poet laureate of Marin County.
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MICHELLE BITTING
Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, Notes to the Beloved, The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024, and she is hard at work on a hybrid auto-fiction novel focused on the life of her great-grandmother, stage and screen character actress Beryl Mercer. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
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JENNIFER ESPINOZA
J Jennifer Espinoza is a poet whose work has been featured in The American Poetry Review, Split Lip Magazine, poets.org, Gulf Coast Journal, The Southeast Review, MoMA Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (2014), THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (2016), and I Don’t Want to Be Understood (2024). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently works in education. Jennifer lives in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.
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ALEXIS RHONE FANCHER
Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle,Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently TRIGGERED (MacQueen’s) EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and DUETS, with Cynthia Atkins (Small Harbor Press). BRAZEN , an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to EROTIC, published in 2023, again from NYQ. A coffee table book of Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband, Fancher. They have an incredible view.
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RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, novelist, and photographer. Her visual and literary work has appeared widely, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and British Vogue. Her debut novel, Promise (Random House) was published in 2023. She lives in New York City.
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TANYA KO HONG
Tanya (Hyonhye) Ko Hong (고현혜) is an internationally published poet, translator, and cultural curator who champions bilingual poetry and poets. She is the author of five books, including The War Still Within (KYSO Flash Press, 2019). Her poetry appears in Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly (The Feminist Press), the Choson Ilbo, and The Korea Times, among others. Her poems have been translated into Albanian, Bosnian, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish. In 2015 and 2018, she became the first person to translate and publish Arthur Sze’s poems in Korean. She holds an MFA degree from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her poems have been translated into Albanian, Bosnian, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish. In 2015 and 2018, she became the first person to translate and publish Arthur Sze’s poems in Korean.
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ARMINÉ IKNADOSSIAN
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Arminé Iknadossian immigrated to the United States in 1974 to escape the civil war. She is the author of All That Wasted Fruit (Main Street Rag Press), a collection of poems about the sacred feminine. Iknadossian earned an MFA from Antioch University where she was awarded a fellowship from Summer Poetry in Idyllwild. After teaching English for 20 years, Iknadossian wrote United States of Love & Other Poems (2015). During her tenure as a teacher, The Los Angeles Writing Project awarded Iknadossian a fellowship for their summer residency. In 2017, Red Hen Press selected her to be Writer in the Schools. Iknadossian is also a founding fellow of Anaphora Writing Residency at Otis College of Art and Design.
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SUE ELLEN KUZMA
Sue Ellen Kuzma grew up in upstate New York in a community of Slovak immigrants. Her professional life as a classical singer took her to Europe where she sang n Mozart’s Da Ponte operas directed by Peter Sellars. She was a member of the Proposition Theater in Cambridge MA taught at Trinity-Brown Conservatory in Rhode Island and maintains a voice studio in Natick, MA.
“Over the Air Waves” is her second book of poetry. “Aroused Angel” her first. She won first prize In the Diner competition and has been published in Blueline, Off the Coast, and the Chrtistian Century. Writing poetry was a natural outgrowth of the quiet and solitude I needed and took as the underside of singing. Writing takes me to the water’s edge, to the slow, silent seeing.
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DANUSHA LAMÉRIS
Danusha Laméris’s third book of poems, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of two other books: The Moons of August, winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, 2014, and Bonfire Opera (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award. Laméris is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA program and lives in Santa Cruz, California.
"Small Kindnesses" poem read by Helena Bonham Carter
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KITTY O'MEARA
Kitty O’Meara lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, Phillip Hagedorn, their five rescue dogs, two cats, gardens, and books. Formerly a middle school writing and literature teacher and hospital and hospice chaplain, she is currently a spiritual director and has been a lifelong writer and artist. She has been called “the poet laureate of the pandemic” based on her wildly popular, widely circulated, and hopeful poem about the Covid-19 pandemic. That poem is illustrated and presented in book form in the bestselling And the People Stayed Home, published by Tra Publishing. She is also the author of The Rare, Tiny Flower (Tra Publishing, 2021).
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MIRABAI STARR
Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author of creative non-fiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. Her latest book, WILD MERCY: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, was named one of the “Best Books of 2019”.
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NANCY LYNÉE WOO
Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet and eco-organizer who harbors a wild love for the natural world. Nancy has received fellowships from California Creative Corps, Artists at Work, PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University and is the author of “I’d Rather Be Lightning” (Gasher, 2023).