Contributors
Maria Berardi was educated at Hampshire College, University of Colorado, Denver, and Naropa University. Her first poetry collection, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and she is currently at work on her second, Pagan, from which the poems published here are excerpted. Her work has been published widely online and in print, as well as at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, as part of an installation by fabric artist Bonnie Ferrill Roman. She lives in the foothills west of Denver at 8,888 feet above sea level.
Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator, and travel writer. Her works appear in over 180 journals in Canada, the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa, and she has published twelve chapbooks of poetry–including Caribbean Nights (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Notes from the Patagonia (dancing girl press, 2017) and On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019). She also authors travel narratives, articles, and guidebooks. Caputo has done over two hundred literary readings, from Alaska to the Patagonia. She travels through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer.
Andrea Chase is a writer/photographer residing in San Francisco, where the fog is evocative, the movie scene is sophisticated, and the politics roil like the great storm on Jupiter. It’s invigorating. Read her movie reviews and interviews at https://www.killermoviereviews.com.
Stevie Cornell is a singer/songwriter and recent transplant to Sonoma County. He was a veteran of the early SF punk scene in the seventies and went on to form the popular Bay Area Americana band the Movie Stars, which morphed into the retro-country band Red Meat in the early nineties. After moving to rural Vermont to raise a family early in the century, he is back in California and launching a belated solo career. His website is at steviecornell.com. Also look for music on his Bandcamp site at https://steviecornell.bandcamp.com.
Jim Damron lives and works in Merced, California. Jim has painted and shown oil paintings in California and New York City since 1989. An outsider, self-taught artist, he sees himself as an expeditionary artist, painting a wide range of subjects, documenting the images he comes across in his world. He has been represented and shown in galleries in San Francisco, but mostly he has sold work in spaces in New York City. Most recently he had a solo show, Wild America, at Nhà Mình in Brooklyn. To see more work, visit his Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/jimdamronstudio/.
Brian Dickson is the author of the chapbooks Maybe This Is How Tides Work (Finishing Line Press) and In a Heart’s Rut (High5 Press) and the book All Points Radiant (Cherry Grove Collections), and has been published in various journals. He teaches composition, poetry, and literature at the Community College of Denver and is the faculty editor for Ourglass, the CCD literary magazine. When not teaching, he avoids driving as much as possible and wanders the Front Range region by foot, bike, bus, or train. “The Makings of a Good Athlete” was originally performed as part of a preshow in honor of The Vagina Monologues at the Community College of Denver.
Ebuka Evans is a writer from Nigeria, currently pursuing a B.A. in English and literature at the University of Nigeria. His works touch on the deep happenings of life, depression and death, mostly. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in NantyGreens, Our Life Logs, Ngiga Review, Rigorous and elsewhere.
Fiona Fox is a writer, artist, musician, environmental activist, and middle schooler. Her poem “New Feathers,” written when she was very small, was the inspiration for the name and the spirit of this literary journal. She is the founder of the Peace, Animals, and Wisdom Society (https://pawsofpeace.weebly.com/). Check out her music podcast at https://themusicstreampodcast.wordpress.com/.
Veronika Hilská is an artist living and working alternately in Prague and in a secluded cottage in the northeast Bohemian mountains. As a small child, she had believed the cottage dated back to the medieval times. She takes inspiration from both the urban environment and the magical natural surroundings of the rural place. She has worked with different art forms, from drawing and painting to three-dimensional objects, sculpture, and jewelry.
Trent Hudley is the author of the short story collection One of These Days, published by Veliz Books. He currently teaches at the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver, Colorado. He has taught creative writing in Regis University’s M.A. program, and teaches literature and composition at Metropolitan State University and the Community College of Denver. He earned his M.F.A. from the University of Texas in El Paso. He was raised and still resides in Denver, Colorado, and before he entered the world of academia he held a multitude of positions, including working in the Denver Post sports room and working as a janitor, kitchen manager, painter, security guard, and a multitude of other similar jobs that still help to inspire his art.
Cindy Kennedy is an artist living in Toronto, Ontario. She is self-taught, and most of her art is done with her hands and fingers, as opposed to a brush. To date, she has created over 350 pieces. Her passion is art. She is inspired by originality and imagination, loves to create something from nothing and bring joy to the eyes of those who gaze upon it. Color and brightness excite her and quirky and strange drives her. To see more of her work, visit her Instagram page: www.instagram.com/ladyandcanvass/
Edward Lee is an artist and writer from Ireland. His paintings and photography have been exhibited widely, while his poetry, short stories, and nonfiction have been published in magazines in Ireland, England, and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. He is currently working on two photography collections: Lying Down with the Dead and There Is a Beauty in Broken Things. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has been an adopted son of the city and state of New York for over forty years. His writing has appeared, in English and Spanish, in Mutantia and Expreso Imaginario (Argentina); B2 (Germany); and River River Journal, The Poetry Distillery, First Literary Review-East, and in the upcoming July issue of The American Journal of Poetry (United States). In addition, he released a chapbook of poems in collaboration with Madalasa Mobili, published by Seranam Press, called Three Unknown Poets.
K. Silem Mohammad is the author of several books of poetry, including Deer Head Nation, A Thousand Devils, Breathalyzer, and The Front. In The Sonnagrams, Mohammad anagrammatizes Shakespeare’s sonnets into all-new English sonnets in iambic pentameter. He is also editor of the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and faculty editor of West Wind Review. He teaches English and writing at Southern Oregon University.
Kona Morris was cofounder and editor of Fast Forward Press, a publication devoted to flash fiction, as well as the founder and writer of the satirical comic book company Godless Comics (www.godlesscomics.com). She has been featured as a writer and editor at literary events across the country, and her stories and prose poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Connotation Press, Santa Fe Literary Review, Flâneur Foundry, Bombay Gin, and many others. Kona helps to run the F-Bomb Flash Fiction Reading Series in Denver, where she also teaches existential literature and letter regurgitation to college students. Visit her website at www.konamorris.com.
Nicholas B. Morris is a writer and teacher living in Denver, Colorado. He is the curator of the monthly F-bomb Reading Series, which specializes in performances of original flash fiction from writers around Denver and elsewhere. His fiction, poetry, and otherwise has appeared online and in print in Nebo, Danse Macabre Online, Cliterature, Connotation Press, Prose Podcast with Jared I. Magee, Gratia Magazine, and others.
Lisa Panepinto is poetry editor for Cabildo Quarterly and author of where i come from the fish have souls, On This Borrowed Bike, and the chapbook Island Dreams. Visit her online at https://wavesturntosongs.wordpress.com.
Kiev Rattee was born and raised in Vermont (with a five-year stint in the Bay Area of California) and now lives with his wife, two pudgy cats, and a red-eared slider turtle in Manchester, Vermont, where he works at a brewing and winemaking media company. Enough Said, a letterpress chapbook of exchange poems with his father, Michael Rattee, was published in 2002 by Adastra Press. He is a member of the Ruth Stone House poetry workshop that meets weekly in Brandon, Vermont.
C. R. Resetarits is a writer and visual artist. Her art and collages have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including the current covers of The Florida Review and Falling Star.
Kurt Ribak’s albums feature his own original, yet accessible, compositions. Kurt describes his music as “Charles Mingus meets the Meters. They go to Duke Ellington’s house to jam. Cachao and Thelonious Monk sit in.”
Kurt went to UC Berkeley, then won scholarships to Berklee College of Music and graduated with top honors. He’s shared the stage with circus performers, preachers, and fire-breathing strippers–but never all three at once.
His recordings are played on KCSM-FM, KPFA, KZSC, KZFR, KKUP, San Diego's Jazz 88, and Public Radio International’s Jazz After Hours. He’s had sold-out appearances at Yoshi’s and performed at SFJAZZ in the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Kurt has appeared at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, San Jose Jazz Festival, Nor-Cal Jazz Festival, Fillmore Street Jazz Festival, and Blue Note Napa. Other venues include a club where someone stashed a loaded .45 in his bass bag.
Kurt’s recordings are available on iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. Just type “Kurt Ribak” in the search window.
Judith Skillman is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. Her recent collection is Came Home to Winter (Deerbrook Editions, 2019). Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Zyzzyva, and other journals. Visit www.judithskillman.com.
Alan Winnikoff is the owner of a public relations and social media firm in New York City. He is a native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Colorado College. Portions of “These Lean Times” are loosely adapted from his forthcoming novel Not Sleeping, to be published by Crowsnest Books in 2021. Alan has also published the novella The Weekend, which reviewers described as “smooth,” “reflective,” and “a stunning picture of doubt, realization, and the what-ifs of love.”
Ron Wolff tries, through his photography, to encompass an expansive palette of natural beauty, abstract art, and portraits of the human soul. He attempts to capture elements of a complex world replete with elegance, grandeur, sadness, wonderment, strength, vulnerability, tenderness, failure to achieve the apex of human potential, and, occasionally, comic relief.
Harumi Yukawa started calligraphy in early childhood, apprenticed to Sanshu Uemura, who was a master of Japanese calligraphy in Japan. After earning a traditional calligraphy instructor’s license, she embarked on a journey to broaden her art experience in the United States. She received an associate degree from City College of San Francisco and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, to acquire further education. Taking charcoal drawing classes in the early years gave her a deeper understanding of composition, how to create the space between black and white, which was in the same manner as calligraphy. Later, color dynamics class led her to an interest in watercolor paintings. She received a bachelor’s degree of art practice from UC Berkeley in 2009. Harumi now lives in Japan, loves to practice traditional tea ceremony, and currently teaches a drawing class as her life’s work. To see more of her art, visit her website at https://www.harumiyukawa.com.
Kenneth W. Zeigler is the author of the book-length comic epic Chronicles of Sir Dred. He currently lives in Yucatan, Mexico. His website is archpoetshortstories.wordpress.com.
Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina.
Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator, and travel writer. Her works appear in over 180 journals in Canada, the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa, and she has published twelve chapbooks of poetry–including Caribbean Nights (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Notes from the Patagonia (dancing girl press, 2017) and On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019). She also authors travel narratives, articles, and guidebooks. Caputo has done over two hundred literary readings, from Alaska to the Patagonia. She travels through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer.
Andrea Chase is a writer/photographer residing in San Francisco, where the fog is evocative, the movie scene is sophisticated, and the politics roil like the great storm on Jupiter. It’s invigorating. Read her movie reviews and interviews at https://www.killermoviereviews.com.
Stevie Cornell is a singer/songwriter and recent transplant to Sonoma County. He was a veteran of the early SF punk scene in the seventies and went on to form the popular Bay Area Americana band the Movie Stars, which morphed into the retro-country band Red Meat in the early nineties. After moving to rural Vermont to raise a family early in the century, he is back in California and launching a belated solo career. His website is at steviecornell.com. Also look for music on his Bandcamp site at https://steviecornell.bandcamp.com.
Jim Damron lives and works in Merced, California. Jim has painted and shown oil paintings in California and New York City since 1989. An outsider, self-taught artist, he sees himself as an expeditionary artist, painting a wide range of subjects, documenting the images he comes across in his world. He has been represented and shown in galleries in San Francisco, but mostly he has sold work in spaces in New York City. Most recently he had a solo show, Wild America, at Nhà Mình in Brooklyn. To see more work, visit his Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/jimdamronstudio/.
Brian Dickson is the author of the chapbooks Maybe This Is How Tides Work (Finishing Line Press) and In a Heart’s Rut (High5 Press) and the book All Points Radiant (Cherry Grove Collections), and has been published in various journals. He teaches composition, poetry, and literature at the Community College of Denver and is the faculty editor for Ourglass, the CCD literary magazine. When not teaching, he avoids driving as much as possible and wanders the Front Range region by foot, bike, bus, or train. “The Makings of a Good Athlete” was originally performed as part of a preshow in honor of The Vagina Monologues at the Community College of Denver.
Ebuka Evans is a writer from Nigeria, currently pursuing a B.A. in English and literature at the University of Nigeria. His works touch on the deep happenings of life, depression and death, mostly. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in NantyGreens, Our Life Logs, Ngiga Review, Rigorous and elsewhere.
Fiona Fox is a writer, artist, musician, environmental activist, and middle schooler. Her poem “New Feathers,” written when she was very small, was the inspiration for the name and the spirit of this literary journal. She is the founder of the Peace, Animals, and Wisdom Society (https://pawsofpeace.weebly.com/). Check out her music podcast at https://themusicstreampodcast.wordpress.com/.
Veronika Hilská is an artist living and working alternately in Prague and in a secluded cottage in the northeast Bohemian mountains. As a small child, she had believed the cottage dated back to the medieval times. She takes inspiration from both the urban environment and the magical natural surroundings of the rural place. She has worked with different art forms, from drawing and painting to three-dimensional objects, sculpture, and jewelry.
Trent Hudley is the author of the short story collection One of These Days, published by Veliz Books. He currently teaches at the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver, Colorado. He has taught creative writing in Regis University’s M.A. program, and teaches literature and composition at Metropolitan State University and the Community College of Denver. He earned his M.F.A. from the University of Texas in El Paso. He was raised and still resides in Denver, Colorado, and before he entered the world of academia he held a multitude of positions, including working in the Denver Post sports room and working as a janitor, kitchen manager, painter, security guard, and a multitude of other similar jobs that still help to inspire his art.
Cindy Kennedy is an artist living in Toronto, Ontario. She is self-taught, and most of her art is done with her hands and fingers, as opposed to a brush. To date, she has created over 350 pieces. Her passion is art. She is inspired by originality and imagination, loves to create something from nothing and bring joy to the eyes of those who gaze upon it. Color and brightness excite her and quirky and strange drives her. To see more of her work, visit her Instagram page: www.instagram.com/ladyandcanvass/
Edward Lee is an artist and writer from Ireland. His paintings and photography have been exhibited widely, while his poetry, short stories, and nonfiction have been published in magazines in Ireland, England, and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. He is currently working on two photography collections: Lying Down with the Dead and There Is a Beauty in Broken Things. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has been an adopted son of the city and state of New York for over forty years. His writing has appeared, in English and Spanish, in Mutantia and Expreso Imaginario (Argentina); B2 (Germany); and River River Journal, The Poetry Distillery, First Literary Review-East, and in the upcoming July issue of The American Journal of Poetry (United States). In addition, he released a chapbook of poems in collaboration with Madalasa Mobili, published by Seranam Press, called Three Unknown Poets.
K. Silem Mohammad is the author of several books of poetry, including Deer Head Nation, A Thousand Devils, Breathalyzer, and The Front. In The Sonnagrams, Mohammad anagrammatizes Shakespeare’s sonnets into all-new English sonnets in iambic pentameter. He is also editor of the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and faculty editor of West Wind Review. He teaches English and writing at Southern Oregon University.
Kona Morris was cofounder and editor of Fast Forward Press, a publication devoted to flash fiction, as well as the founder and writer of the satirical comic book company Godless Comics (www.godlesscomics.com). She has been featured as a writer and editor at literary events across the country, and her stories and prose poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Connotation Press, Santa Fe Literary Review, Flâneur Foundry, Bombay Gin, and many others. Kona helps to run the F-Bomb Flash Fiction Reading Series in Denver, where she also teaches existential literature and letter regurgitation to college students. Visit her website at www.konamorris.com.
Nicholas B. Morris is a writer and teacher living in Denver, Colorado. He is the curator of the monthly F-bomb Reading Series, which specializes in performances of original flash fiction from writers around Denver and elsewhere. His fiction, poetry, and otherwise has appeared online and in print in Nebo, Danse Macabre Online, Cliterature, Connotation Press, Prose Podcast with Jared I. Magee, Gratia Magazine, and others.
Lisa Panepinto is poetry editor for Cabildo Quarterly and author of where i come from the fish have souls, On This Borrowed Bike, and the chapbook Island Dreams. Visit her online at https://wavesturntosongs.wordpress.com.
Kiev Rattee was born and raised in Vermont (with a five-year stint in the Bay Area of California) and now lives with his wife, two pudgy cats, and a red-eared slider turtle in Manchester, Vermont, where he works at a brewing and winemaking media company. Enough Said, a letterpress chapbook of exchange poems with his father, Michael Rattee, was published in 2002 by Adastra Press. He is a member of the Ruth Stone House poetry workshop that meets weekly in Brandon, Vermont.
C. R. Resetarits is a writer and visual artist. Her art and collages have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including the current covers of The Florida Review and Falling Star.
Kurt Ribak’s albums feature his own original, yet accessible, compositions. Kurt describes his music as “Charles Mingus meets the Meters. They go to Duke Ellington’s house to jam. Cachao and Thelonious Monk sit in.”
Kurt went to UC Berkeley, then won scholarships to Berklee College of Music and graduated with top honors. He’s shared the stage with circus performers, preachers, and fire-breathing strippers–but never all three at once.
His recordings are played on KCSM-FM, KPFA, KZSC, KZFR, KKUP, San Diego's Jazz 88, and Public Radio International’s Jazz After Hours. He’s had sold-out appearances at Yoshi’s and performed at SFJAZZ in the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Kurt has appeared at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, San Jose Jazz Festival, Nor-Cal Jazz Festival, Fillmore Street Jazz Festival, and Blue Note Napa. Other venues include a club where someone stashed a loaded .45 in his bass bag.
Kurt’s recordings are available on iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. Just type “Kurt Ribak” in the search window.
Judith Skillman is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. Her recent collection is Came Home to Winter (Deerbrook Editions, 2019). Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Zyzzyva, and other journals. Visit www.judithskillman.com.
Alan Winnikoff is the owner of a public relations and social media firm in New York City. He is a native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Colorado College. Portions of “These Lean Times” are loosely adapted from his forthcoming novel Not Sleeping, to be published by Crowsnest Books in 2021. Alan has also published the novella The Weekend, which reviewers described as “smooth,” “reflective,” and “a stunning picture of doubt, realization, and the what-ifs of love.”
Ron Wolff tries, through his photography, to encompass an expansive palette of natural beauty, abstract art, and portraits of the human soul. He attempts to capture elements of a complex world replete with elegance, grandeur, sadness, wonderment, strength, vulnerability, tenderness, failure to achieve the apex of human potential, and, occasionally, comic relief.
Harumi Yukawa started calligraphy in early childhood, apprenticed to Sanshu Uemura, who was a master of Japanese calligraphy in Japan. After earning a traditional calligraphy instructor’s license, she embarked on a journey to broaden her art experience in the United States. She received an associate degree from City College of San Francisco and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, to acquire further education. Taking charcoal drawing classes in the early years gave her a deeper understanding of composition, how to create the space between black and white, which was in the same manner as calligraphy. Later, color dynamics class led her to an interest in watercolor paintings. She received a bachelor’s degree of art practice from UC Berkeley in 2009. Harumi now lives in Japan, loves to practice traditional tea ceremony, and currently teaches a drawing class as her life’s work. To see more of her art, visit her website at https://www.harumiyukawa.com.
Kenneth W. Zeigler is the author of the book-length comic epic Chronicles of Sir Dred. He currently lives in Yucatan, Mexico. His website is archpoetshortstories.wordpress.com.
Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina.