Kathy Berger‘s publication credits include a short story in the now-defunct Rosebud and a child’s folktale in an anthology. For most of her professional career she wrote and edited proposals for rockets to launch satellites and astronauts to infinity and beyond. She taught technical and business writing to engineers as well as participles and Julius Caesar to squirming junior high school students. She lives in southern California in a home decorated with the beautiful work of her husband, an artist.
Kathy fights writer’s block by eating chocolate chips out of the bag.
Lavina Blossom is a visual artist as well as a writer. She grew up in rural Michigan and now lives in Southern California, where she is growing a native California garden of drought tolerant plants that support local fauna. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including 3Elements Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Common Ground Review, and Ekphrastic Review.
Lavina sees faces and figures in practically anything with texture: rugs, ceilings, wood floors, balled up socks. So far, she has created over 250 ACEO cards on which she indulged this tendency without restraint.
Bennett Durkan‘s fiction has appeared in The Garfield Lake Review, Short Story Town, and Atomic Flyswatter. His poetry has appeared in Divot, Willard & Maple, and Ikleftiko. He has also appeared in the collection Hell is for Children.
Bennett Durkan doesn’t really like to talk about himself and tried to start as a reclusive writer, but he wasn’t famous enough for it.
Brian Evans-Jones is originally from the UK and now lives in New Hampshire. He won the 2017 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and was the Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, in 2012-13.His poems are published or forthcoming in A Book of Matches, Outlook Springs, The Café Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and other outlets. He teaches creative writing online and in schools, and he publishes free resources on poetry and creativity at The Poetry Place.
When he’s not writing poetry, Brian can generally be found trying to stop bears from killing his chickens.
“saturday with kenneth koch” first appeared in Guided by Surprise charity anthology (2011)
D.R. James‘s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals. Recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, James lives, writes, vegges, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
D.R. James splits his time between staring at the woods from a living-room recliner and staring at the woods from a patio recliner.
“For Therapy, I Mix Metaphors” first appeared in the author’s chapbook Psychological Clock (Finishing Line Press, 2007)
Hailing from the beautiful state of Kerala, Feby Joseph‘s name is an anagram for a forbidden meat in his country. A piano teacher by day, he was the winner of Reuel International Prize – II, Poetry, 2020. Some of his works have appeared on Café Dissensus, Foreign Literary Journal, Riddled with Arrows and The Bangalore Review.
Feby often dreams of spending an evening reading the poems of William Blake, but owing to the fact that Blake has yet to reciprocate, he has given up on the fantasy and instead spends his evening watching cat videos. Feby hopes to do for poetry what Einstein did for Ornithology.
Desirée Jung is an artist born in Brazil, and adopted by Vancouver, Canada. She has published translations, poetry, and fiction in several magazines around the world. She has also participated in many artist residencies. Her education includes a film degree from Vancouver Film School, a BFA in Creative Writing, an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Comparative Literature, all from the University of British Columbia. Writing, for her, is a hopeless attempt to capture light. Her most recent work is a series of video poems that can be seen on her website desireejung.com.
Désirée has been trying to ignore herself for her entire life, until life began to forget her too. The day that happened, a shadow covered her face and she was able to see a spectrum of light. In between dreaming, she sleeps and listens to what the unconscious has to tell her about moths and butterflies.
E.E. King is an award-winning painter, performer, writer, and naturalist—she’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld, and Flametree. Her art has been collected internationally. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on Metastellar YouTube. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at: elizabetheveking.com
E.E. does bird rescue and there are three magpies screaming outside her window.
Chris Kuriata lives in and often writes about the Niagara Region. His stories about whale-hunting clowns, singing fish, and time-traveling kittens have appeared in many fine publications. He enjoys taking Doobie out in the afternoon, and admires her gentle nature with cats, as well as her fierce loyalty to her beloved owner, Vicki. You can find him on Twitter: @CKuriata
Kelley J. P. Lindberg writes YA and adult fiction, poetry, and essays, and has been published in The Baltimore Review, The Citron Review, and others, as well as in the Tellables app for the Amazon Alexa platform. When not writing from her home in Colorado, she’s traveling as far and as often as she can. She blogs about the writer’s life and writing craft on her website KelleyLindberg.com.
Over the years, Kelley has raced hermit crabs in the British Virgin Islands; slept in an Irish nunnery; eyed Mt. Vesuvius warily from the streets of Pompeii; snorkeled with sharks in Belize, stingrays in Bora-Bora, and a thousand dolphins in South Africa; and commiserated over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with Shakespeare’s ghost in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Eileen Malone is widely published. Her writing awards for her poetry and stories include four nominations for Pushcart prizes. Collections published: Letters with Taloned Claws (Poets Corner Press, Sacramento), I Should Have Given Them Water (Ragged Sky Press, Princeton), It Could Be Me, Although Unsure by Kelsay Books, Aldrich Press. She grew up in the U.K. and Australia and now lives in the coastal fog at the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area where she founded and now directs the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition.
Eileen doesn’t believe everything she thinks, thus far, anyway.
“Dead Bird: Another Mental Illness Poem” first appeared in Three Soul-Makers (Wapshott Press)
Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens (Bordighera Press) and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, The Sycamore Review, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest), and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review. jennmartelli.com
Jennifer lives with the most literary and beautiful cat, Maria. She also is a mean crossword puzzle solver.
David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Denver Quarterly, The Poetry Porch, subTerrain, Clementine Unbound, Constellations, Lily Poetry Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among others. His poem “Add One Father to Earth” was awarded an Honorable Mention by Robert Pinsky for the New England Poetry Club’s 2019 Samuel Washington Allen Prize competition.
David lives with his wife, the visual artist Jane Wiley, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, in an 1890s house where you get hot water from the shower if you turn the control to Cold. Fortunately, they don’t have many overnight guests.
Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct magazines and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake and Eclectica, that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and (increasingly) next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.
Jim has numbered his poems consecutively from secondary school on and still has copies of every last one of them. ‘The Case Against Poetry’ is #1105 and his most recent poem #1294. He regards #453 as his first grownup poem.
Colette Parris is a Caribbean-American recovering attorney who returned to her literary roots during the pandemic. Her fiction can be found in Cleaver Magazine, Scoundrel Time, Vestal Review, Streetlight Magazine, and other journals, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as Best Microfiction. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Healing Muse, BigCityLit, Thin Air Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Westchester County, New York. Read more at coletteparris.com.
Colette is obsessed with British mystery novels and confounded by the fact that people (including blood relatives) frequently spell her name incorrectly.
Janet M. Powers is Professor Emerita at Gettysburg College, where she taught South Asian Studies. She has published poetry in many small journals. Her chapbook, Difficult to Subdue as the Wind, appeared in 2009. This old lady still stands with signs on street corners trying to make sense of our sorry world.
Born during a historic blizzard in South Dakota and raised in North Dakota, Mary C. Rowin often writes about the plains but more often about the kettle ponds near her home in Wisconsin, although traveling has always been a priority. Mary’s poems have been published in numerous journals such as Panoply, Stone Boat, Persimmon Tree and Solitary Plover. Nominated for a Pushcart, her poetry awards include prizes from the Journal from the Heartland and the Nebraska Writer’s Guild. Written from Odense, Denmark, July 2022.
Judith Shapiro is a writer working on her first novel. Whenever it looks the other way, she secretly writes anything else. Her work has appeared in Pigeon Review, Moss Piglet, Pure Slush, The Sun and many others. See more at PeaceInEveryLeaf.com.
Judith spends half the year living on the opposite coast, constantly wondering which way is north and marveling at the sun that sets on the horizon instead of rising.
Maheshwar N. Sinha, he/him, a self-taught artist, graduated from Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. Creation of art is like playing with a kite, fly high yet remain rooted.” Paintings are shown in the country and across, like- Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Bengaluru, , Dubai, South Korea, Austria, London and Venice. Artworks are widely published in the country and overseas’ literary-art journals. Also write in Hindi and English- short stories, (novels, too), articles have been extensively published. Lives in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh with wife, Sharmila, with her delicious stuff and daughters Anjali and Shruti, hyper and hilarious respectively. A chapbook, released recently by ShabdAaweg EPress: shabd.aaweg.com/product/mgmc
An ardent fan of women’s beauty and their gesture (of both kind- open and mysterious) and nature- the entire world of Maheshwar’s art revolves round them.
Alice Whittenburg’s short fiction can be found in Atlas & Alice, The Big Jewel, Eclectica Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essays appear in Ekphrastic Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, and elsewhere. She is coeditor of The Cafe Irreal, an online magazine of irreal fiction, and of The Irreal Reader, Fiction & Essays from The Cafe Irreal. She has spent more than four years in Prague in the Czech Republic, and three of her stories are included in The Return of Kral Majales: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010. Her website is www.alicewhittenburg.com.
Alice lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her partner, Greg; a dog named Minnie; and a turtle named Angela.
Riddled with Arrows 5.4:
“Open-Theme”
Open Fiction | Open Poetry
Open Foreword | Open Ars Poetica
Open Contents | Open Contributor Bios
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