Issue #22, May 2025

Hetta has written poetry on and off her whole life. She started writing again most recently for her young children before expanding into other areas and starting to try to find the right audience for her work. She is - in real life - a barrister who is now based in rural Lincolnshire, where she also grew up. She is heavily inspired by her native landscape, and feels that her roots in the marshes of coastal Lincolnshire have heavily influenced her writing. She engages with poetry as a way not only to express and examine the exigencies and excitements of life, but to enjoy working with words in a way that is not possible in her professional life.
 

Rachel Barton is a poet, writing coach, and editor for her own Willawaw Journal, associate editor for Cloudbank Books. Her recent collection "Jacob's Ladder" (Main Street Rag 2024) and her previous "This is the Lightness" (The Poetry Box 2022) are both available though her website, rachelbartonwriter.com. Barton lives and writes in the Willamette Valley though her ghosts occasionally call her back to West Virginia, Indiana, and Alaska.
 

Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include "The Light Becomes Us" (Main Street Rag, forthcoming 2025), "Babylon Songs" (First Bite Press, forthcoming), "These Terrible Sacraments" (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), "The Kentucky Vein" (Punkin House, 2011), "God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems" (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks "That Reckless Sound" and "Some Assembly Required" (Pork Belly Press, 2014).
 

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Pangyrus Lit, The Pierian, Propel Magazine, Atticus Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets and elsewhere. He won the third Prize in the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2024 and the Alexander Pope Poetry Award in 2023. He was the Editor’s Choice Prize Winner of Unleash Lit in 2024. He was the Second Poetry Prize Winner at the Streetlights Poetry Prize in 2024 and Winner of the Poet of the Month December-January 2025 at the Literary Shark Poetry Contest.
 

Stephanie L. Harper is a neurodivergent poet, mother, and transplant from Oregon now living in Indiana with the world's most adorable husband, cat, and puppy. In a former life, she earned her BA in English & German from Grinnell College, IA, and MA in German from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. More recently, she homeschooled and raised her extraordinary children to adulthood in Oregon, and completed her MFA in Poetry at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. Her poems appear in The Dodge, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Salamander Magazine, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Taos Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.