Poets
Kirun Kapur
Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her second collection, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and was included in the Best Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Named an “Asian-American poet to watch” by NBC News, her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She has been granted fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell Colony. Kapur serves as the editor at The Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the nation’s oldest poetry publications. She teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program. Learn more at kirunkapur.com.
Desiree C. Bailey
Educated at Georgetown University, BA English Literature, 2011; Brown University, MFA Fiction, 2015; New York University, MFA Poetry, 2021. Desiree C. Bailey is a poet and writer from Trinidad and Tobago, and New York. She is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. What Noise Against the Cane was also a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is also the author of the short fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’Clock Press) and has been published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, and the Academy of American Poets, among other journals. She has received fellowships and residencies from Princeton in Africa, the Norman Mailer Center, Kimbilio Fiction, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Poets House, The Conversation, and the James Merrill House. She is a recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts award and the Poets & Writers’ Amy Award. Desiree was previously the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University and joined the faculty at UMass Amherst’s MFA for Poets and Writers as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2024.
Tzivia Gover
Tzivia Gover is the author of several books about dreams, sleep, and waking up to a joyful life. Her most recent book, Dreaming on the Page: Tap into Your Midnight Mind to Supercharge Your Writing, combines writing, spirituality, and dreamwork. It won top honors in its category from the Independent Book Publishers Association and was named a finalist in its category by the Foreward Indies prize. Her poems have been published in dozens of journals and anthologies including Willawaw Journal, The Other Journal, The Mom Egg Review, The Naugatuck River Review, and Lilith Magazine among others. She is currently working on a project, The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined, poems inspired by the story of Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham, which she shares via Substack.
John Hennessy
John Hennessy is the author of the collections Exit Garden State (Lost Horse Press, 2024/Eastern Washington UP), Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013), and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point, 2007). His poems have been published in journals and anthologies including The Believer, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, The Huffington Post, Jacket, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry at Sangam, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. He is cotranslator with Ostap Kin of A New Orthography (Lost Horse Press, 2020), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, which was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2021 and won the Derek Walcott Prize 2021. Hennessy and Kin also translated the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard University Press, 2023). Their translations of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych have been published in The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, and Set Change, a forthcoming book of Andrukhovych’s selected poems in translation from New York Review Books. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Gri Saex
Gri Saex moved to New York from the Dominican Republic decades ago. She considers Western Massachusetts her second home, as it is where she has received many gifts from her roles as a teacher, counselor, healthcare interpreter, mother, friend, activist, and most importantly, as a student of life. She studied Spanish Literature and Art in college, and today partakes as an active member in many community advocacy groups, such as the Climate Change Initiative lead by Live Well Springfield, the Healthy Air Network, and the Clean Water Network, all based in the city of Springfield. Along with her participation in activism in Springfield, Gri currently attends Bard Micro College, and hopes to transfer to Mount Holyoke College or Smith College to finish her degree.
Paula Sayword
Paula Sayword has been writing poetry for fifty years but only began to take herself seriously after she retired from a career in public housing. With her long-time partner, she lives in Western, Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in Sanctuary, the Journal of Massachusetts Audubon Society; the Naugatuck River Review, Cyclamen & Swords, Sinister Wisdom, The Zuni Mountain Poets and Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology. A chapbook, What Sleeps Inside was published by Slate Roof Press in 2010. Canticle of Light and Dark ( 2014 ) and Garden of things Lost (2021) were both published by The Synthesis Center Press.
Sandy Yannone
Sandra Yannone is the author of The Glass Studio (2024) and Boats for Women (2019), both published by Salmon Poetry in County Clare, Ireland. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, SWWIM Every Day, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland Review, Lavender Review, and Women’s Review of Books. Since March, 2020, she has hosted the weekly reading series Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Zoom via Facebook. She resides flexibly in her hometown where she is currently the Poet Laureate of Old Saybrook, CT. Visit her at www.sandrayannone.com.
Adam Grabowski
Adam Grabowski is the author of the chapbook Go On Bewilderment (Attack Bear Press, 2020). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Ninth Letter, OVERSOUND, New Ohio Review, Plume, Sixth Finch, jubilat, Off the Coast, DMQ Review, Hobart, Rust + Moth, Exit 7, Bullets into Bells (online), past-ten, Night Coffee, Drunk in a Midnight Choir,The Naugatuck River Review, Radius, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart nominee and the recipient of a 2021 Parent-Writer Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Adam holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He lives in Western Massachusetts where he is the associate poetry editor of The Maine Review.
Ide Thompson
Ide Amari Thompson (he/they) is a Black and Queer Caribbean writer from Nassau, Bahamas. They are working on an MLS degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champange and have an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst and are a TinHouse 2024 Winter Alum and a reader at the Massachusetts Review. Their written work has appeared in the PREE online journal, Onyx magazine, exhibitions by the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Stellium Literary Magazine, Maple Tree Literary Supplement and is forthcoming in Juxtaprose Magazine and Jelly Bucket.
Michael Mercurio
A poet, editor, and occasional critic, Michael Mercurio lives and writes in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. His poems, interviews, and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Thrush, The Common, Cream City Review, Sierra (the magazine of the Sierra Club), Sugar House Review, Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Michael is the founder and curator of What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series, where established and emerging poets read together monthly on Zoom. In addition, he posts regular dispatches on his Substack, A Slight Case of Overthinking, including close readings of notable poems and musings on life as an aging Gen Xer.
Adrie Rose
Adrie Rose lives next to an orchard in Western MA and is the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Her work has previously appeared in The Baltimore Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Night Heron Barks, and more. Her chapbook I Will Write a Love Poem was released in 2023 with Porkbelly Press, and her chapbook Rupture was released in 2024 with Gold Line Press. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019 and 2023, a finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2021, named a Highly Commended Poet for the International Gingko Prize in 2023, and won the 2023 Radar Coniston Prize.
Anna Maria Hong
Anna Maria Hong (she/her) is the author of Age of Glass (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2018), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition; the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books, 2018), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize; and Fablesque (Tupelo Press, 2020), winner of the Berkshire Prize. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American (William Morrow/Avon Books, 1993), an anthology of fiction and memoir. Hong’s poetry, essays, and fiction are published in journals and anthologies, including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Ecotone, FENCE, The Common, Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry (Two Sylvias Press, 2014), The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays (University of Iowa Press, 2022), The Best American Poetry, and others. In 2023, Hong guest-edited Traversals: A Folio on Walking with Christine Hume for The Hopkins Review. She has collaborated with visual artists and composers on multimedia works and songs, including the adaptation of her novella, H & G, with composer Allen Shawn, director Jean Randich, and filmmaker Sue Rees into a lyric opera titled H & G, a great and terrible story, which premiered at Bennington College’s Lester Martin Theater in 2022. Her awards and honors include a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a fellowship from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize, and residencies at Yaddo, Djerassi, Fundación Valparaiso, and Kunstnarhuset Messen. She earned a BA in philosophy at Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. An associate professor at Mount Holyoke College, Hong has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Bennington College, Ursinus College, and the University of Washington Bothell.
Nathan McClain
Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Zocalo Public Square, The Critical Flame, and On The Seawall, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as Poetry Editor for The Massachusetts Review.
Sarah B. Sullivan
Sarah B. Sullivan (she/her), of Northampton, MA, is a person, poet, physician, teacher, ocean-lover, partner, parent, lesbian, friend, meditator, dog-mom, and searcher. She wrote some poetry back in her 20’s, and started writing again when illness helped her decide to work less as a doctor and more on her passion for poetry. The community of people she interacts with, whether writing together, critiquing, fundraising, or just sharing work and worries, is a source of joy and fulfillment. Sarah’s poems are published or forthcoming in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Calyx, Little Patuxent Review, Cider Press Review, Switchgrass Review, Sixfold, and WordPeace.co. Additionally, Sarah has three chap books: While it Happened, Together, in Pieces, and Somewhere There’s Always Enough. Her poem “Some Things Only Happen Once” was awarded Calyx’s Lois Cranston Memorial 2023 Poetry Prize , and her poem “Consider Instead” was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize by Willawaw Journal. As well as writing poetry, Sarah is the current Poet/Chairperson of 30 Poems in November, an annual fund raiser for Center for New Americans (CNA) of Western MA. Since 2018, Sarah has led participants in the fund raiser, approximately 70 -100 poets each year, to write a total of 30 poems during the month of November. Sarah led workshops for the writers and sent them a prompt each night as an optional inspiration for the poets to use. Sarah is also a Reader for Calyx Journal of Art and Literature by Women.
Kim Keough
Kim Keough (She/Her) received her BA in English from Mount Holyoke College. Her Poetry and Photography have appeared in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review. She is the former director of Voices from Inside, a writing program for incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated women. She currently lives in Williamsburg.
Lee Desrosiers
Lee (formerly Lori) Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2013), Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak (Salmon, 2016) and Keeping Planes in the Air (Salmon, 2020). Two chapbooks, Inner Sky and typing with e.e. cummings, are from Glass Lyre Press. Their poems have appeared in Ms. Magazine, The New York Times, New Millennium Review, Split this Rock, Contemporary American Voices, String Poet, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene’s Fountain, New Verse News, Mom Egg Review, Cutthroat and many other journals and anthologies. Desrosiers holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College. They won Honorable Mention in the 2023 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, the Liakoura Prize from Glass Lyre Books, and X.J. Kennedy chose their poem “That Pomegranate Shine” for the Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts Poetry Prize. Their work has been nominated for the 2015 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. They edit Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and Wordpeace.co, an online journal dedicated to peace and social justice. Desrosiers teaches Literature and Composition at Westfield State University, Poetry in the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program and is a mentor and manuscript consultant privately.
Michael Favala Goldman
Poet Michael Favala Goldman (b. 1966) is also a Danish literary translator, educator, editor, and jazz clarinetist. Goldman’s seven books of original poetry include Who has time for this? (2020), Slow Phoenix (2021), Small Sovereign (2021), If you were here you would feel at home (2022), This May Sound Familiar (2022), Someday all of this will be yours (2023), and What Minimal Joy (2023). Among his seventeen translated books are Dependency (Penguin Classics) by Tove Ditlevsen, The Water Farm Trilogy by Cecil Bødker, and Something To Live Up To, Selected Poems of Benny Andersen.
Rebecca Hart Olander
Rebecca Hart Olander holds a bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College, a master of arts in teaching in English from Smith College ’96, and a master of fine arts in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She teaches writing at Westfield State University and is the editor/director of Perugia Press, an independent feminist press that publishes full-length poetry collections by emerging women poets. Rebecca’s poetry has appeared recently in Bracken Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere, and her collaborative written and visual work has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press). Rebecca is a Women’s National Book Association poetry contest winner and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her chapbook, Dressing the Wounds, was published in 2019 by dancing girl press, and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats, was released by CavanKerry Press in 2021.
Matt Donovan
Matt Donovan is the author most recently of The Dug-Up Gun Museum (forthcoming from BOA Editions in November 2022) and the collection of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. In addition to his poetry and nonfiction, Donovan frequently collaborates with his wife, the artist Ligia Bouton. Collaborative work includes Inheritance, a chamber opera about America’s gun violence that’s based on the life of Sarah Winchester, and the forthcoming Missing Department, a visual art and poetry erasure project that responds to missing person ads published in early 20th century pulp western magazines. Donovan lives in Massachusetts and serves as the Director of The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
Heather Treseler
Heather Treseler is the author of Auguries & Divinations (Bauhan, 2024), which received the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and the 2024 Shelia Margaret Motton Book Award, and Parturition (Southword, 2020), which received the 2019 chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Cincinnati Review, PN Review, The Irish Times, JAMA, Narrative, The Missouri Review, and The Iowa Review, among other journals. Treseler's essays appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, PN Review, and in eight books about contemporary poetry. Her essay "My Search for Elizabeth Bishop" was cited in Best American Essays. In 2022, she edited Beyond the Frame, Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts, a collection of essays by distinguished New England writers, highlighting signature artworks at the Worcester Art Museum. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as residencies at the Boston Athenaeum, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the T. S. Eliot House. Recipient of the George I. Alden award for Excellence in Teaching, she is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center and professor of English at Worcester State University. She teaches courses in creative writing (poetry and non-fiction), contemporary American literature, and literature and medicine.
Gail Thomas
Gail Thomas most recent books of poetry are Trail of Roots, a chapbook which won the A.V. Christie Series (Seven Kitchens Press) and the full-length collection Leaving Paradise (Human Error Publishing). Her other books are Odd Mercy (Headmistress, 2016), Waving Back (Turning Point, 2015), No Simple Wilderness: An Elegy for Swift River Valley (Haleys, 2001) and Finding the Bear (Perugia Press, 1997). Waving Back was named a Must Read for 2016 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and Honorable Mention at the New England Book Festival. Odd Mercy was chosen by Ellen Bass for the 2016 Charlotte Mew Prize of Headmistress Press. At the center of Odd Mercy is "The Little Mommy Sonnets", awarded Honorable Mention in the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Contest for Traditional Verse. Her poem "Wisteria" won the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize.
D. Dina Friedman
D. Dina Friedman’s newest books are the poetry collection Here in Sanctuary—Whirling, (Querencia Press) and the short-story collection Immigrants (Creators Press), which was first runner up in the short-story category for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her previous books include two YA novels, Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster), Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux) and one book of poetry Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press). Dina has published in over a hundred literary journals including Rattle, Salamander, The Sun, Mass Poetry, Lilith, and Rhino. She has received two Best of the Net and four Pushcart Prize nominations.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s first book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit, was selected by Christopher Citro as winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Prize and was released in April 2024. She is the winner of the 2nd annual Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Her work has appeared in or is coming soon from SIR, Arkansas International, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, Banshee, On the Seawall, Couplet Poetry, Indiana Review, The Common, and Massachusetts Review, among others. Her poems have twice been selected for Best New Poets. She is at work on a series of mixed-media pieces, hem, drawn from The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. In 2024, she joined the advisory board of Perugia Press, and she is an associate editor of Nine Syllables Press, housed at Smith College, where she is the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center.