Terry Belew lives in rural Missouri. His debut collection, The Deep Blue of Neptune, won the 2024 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press. He received his MFA from University of Nebraska-Omaha, where he won the 2022 and 2023 Helen W. Kenefick Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Recent work can be found in journals such as Meridian, Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Gulf Stream, and Tar River Poetry, among many others.

Marisa Bennett is currently a Junior at Kent State Stark with a major in English and a minor in Creative Writing. She is heavily involved in many campus activities, such as English club, Sigma Tau Delta, FAB (Feminism for all Beings), and she's the editor-in-chief for Brainchild Magazine. When she's not being bogged down by schoolwork, she loves spending time with family and friends, listening to music, playing video games, and keeping her chubby cat, Ember, out of trouble.

Clara Britton is a graduate student living and studying in Northeast Ohio. Much of her work explores themes of memory, mental health, and the natural world.

W. Roger Carlisle is a 79-year-old, semi-retired physician. He currently volunteers and works in a free medical clinic for patients living in poverty. He is on a journey of returning home to better understand himself through poetry. He hopes he is becoming more humble in the process.

Caryl Church-Jesseph, M.A. (she/her), is an award winning art educator, artist and writer. Caryl's writing animates the relationship complexities between people, the other-than-human beings and landscapes. Her voice is one of an observer with a writing style that seeks to capture descriptive details and evocative scenes that illustrate the mundane magic of living through endings, and the co-creation of beginnings.

Julia Cilano is a first-year in the Northeast Ohio MFA. They graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the spring of 2023, where they majored in French, English, and Critical Sexuality and Queer Studies. Julia’s work has been published by Moss Puppy Magazine.

Regis Coustillac is a poet living in Toledo, Ohio. His work has appeared in Gordon Square Review, ISACOUSTIC, and Brainchild Magazine.

Alexander Embleton is an illustrator, designer, and comic artist based in Akron, Ohio. He has been a creative his entire life, using art to make sense of the world around him as his family moved across countries, continents, and cultures. Consequently, his work tends to look for the extraordinary in the mundane, and vice versa. 

Olivia Farina (she/her) is a writer from just outside of Cleveland, OH. Her writing focuses on the body, generational trauma, and the grand spectrum of human emotions. Her work has been published in Luna Negra Magazine, Sink Hollow Magazine, and Light Enters the Grove.

If poets were clouds Abigail Fife would be cirrocumulus. She is currently enrolled at Kent State University for her master's degree in library and information science. After work and school Abby is usually lying in bed and staring at the posters tacked to her ceiling. When writing she drinks black coffee but would rather be drinking tea with milk and honey.

Carrie George is a co-editor of Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry, published by Kent State University Press. She is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Indianapolis Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere.

Jill Grunenwald has a BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University and an MLIS from the University of Kentucky. Her memoir Reading Behind Bars: A True Story of Literature, Law, and Life as a Prison Librarian was a 2020 Ohioana Book Awards finalist and shortlisted for the 2020 “In the Margins Social Justice and Advocacy Book Award." Jill’s poetry has appeared in Potomac Review and her essays have appeared in Cleveland Magazine, Fatventure, Tor.com, and Bust.

Jason Harris is a Black American who currently serves as editor-in-chief for Gordon Square Review. His writing has been published in Hobart, Foundry Journal, Barren Magazine, The Shallow Ends, the Cleveland Review of Books, and more. Jason has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and The Watering Hole. In 2021, he served as the Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence at Twelve Literary Arts. Most recently, he served as a co-editor to the nature poetry anthology, Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry (The Kent State University Press). jasonharriswriter.com

Taylour Johnson is a writer from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, currently studying English at Kent State University. While she likes to explore writing in all its forms and genres, from poetry to epic fantasy, her objective is to always mirror the readers feelings back to them and celebrate our capacity to experience life and the emotions that come with it.

Bob King is an English Professor at Kent State University at Stark. His poetry collection And & And was published in August 2024. And/Or is forthcoming in September 2025. He lives in Fairview Park, Ohio. X & Bluesky: @KingRobertJ Website: bobking.org.

Callan Latham is a poet from the Midwest. Her work has been published in places such as Nashville Review, Santa Clara Review, and Chestnut Review. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Michael McLane is a poet, essayist and editor. He is the author of the chapbooks Fume and Trace Elements. He recently completed a PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. He is the editor of The Once and Future Lake, an anthology of work on the Great Salt Lake due out in late 2025. He lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto Prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have also been broadcast and performed globally.

Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his MFA in poetry from the Northeast Ohio M.F.A. program and his B.S. in both Chemistry and English from Allegheny College. The winner of the 2024 Prism Review Poetry prize, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Ninth Letter, Fairy Tale Review, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.

Jessica Miller (she/her) is a designer, photographer, and writer currently based in the American Midwest. She earned her Bachelor of Art in Visual Communication Design from Kent State University and her Master of Research in Design at the University of Dundee. In her design and research work, she is interested in inclusion, accessibility, and design for social good. Her photographic work often focuses on themes related to place, time, and isolation.

Benjamin Anthony Rhodes is a queer and trans poet living in Northeast Ohio. He teaches college writing part-time at two schools to make a living (kind of). Creating art, house-keeping for his life-partner, their hungry cat, and misbehaved dog, keep him living. You can find his published work at: https://linktr.ee/ginger.benji. Free Palestine.

Zach Savich's latest books are the poetry collection Momently (Black Ocean, 2024) and the critical-memoir-for-performance A Field of Telephones (53rd State, 2025). A 2025 NEA Fellow, he teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Born and raised in the great city of Pittsburgh, Regan Schell is a certified Yinzer. She’s also a novelist, poet, and occasional editor. Between bouts of poetic inspiration, Regan writes speculative fiction about love and grief.

Evan P. Schneider is the author of the novel A Simple Machine, Like the Lever and founding editor of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac. He has received fellowships for his work from the Oregon Arts Commission and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Raised in New Mexico and Colorado, he now lives in Western Oregon. His first chapbook of poems, Rural Education, is forthcoming in 2025.

Haylee Schwenk is a poet, editor, and (clichéd as it is) hopeless romantic who has lately been considering the many communities that hold her up and save her life, over and over again. Her work has been published in Great Lakes Review, Q/A, Sheila-Na-Gig, Panoply, and Pudding Magazine, and in the anthology Light Enters the Grove, from Kent State University Press in collaboration with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Anastasia Simms (she/her) is a poetry MFA student at Southern Illinois University where she teaches English. Her work has previously been published in The Marbled Sigh, a Lit Cleveland anthology, Luna Negra, Military Experience and the Arts, and others. When she is not teaching or writing, she can be found cooking, singing, or watching movies with her dog.

Paulina Tesnow is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn. She writes creative nonfiction and holds and MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Mercy Turle is a poet/educator/bearded lady from Cleveland, Ohio. Their work explores the relationship between language, gender, knowledge, and consciousness through Midwestern images and Buddhist schools of thought. By day, Mercy is a poetry and English educator for elementary, middle, and high school students, and the moderator of the high school’s Creative Writing Club. Mercy’s favorite poem to teach is Diane DiPrima’s “Some Lies About the Loba” and their favorite color is indigo.

Olivia Wachtel’s stories and poetry have been published in Brainchild Magazine, Folio, and Luna Negra Online. They currently reside in Boston, working at a specialized school and writing as much as possible.