Joy Priest was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky across the street from the world's most famous horse racing track. She is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets´ Poem-a-Day series and The Atlantic, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, and ESPN. Priest received her MFA in poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. V. Joshua Adams is the author of a chapbook, ColdAffections (Plan B Press, 2018). Work of his has appeared or is forthcoming inBennington Review, Posit, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, andelsewhere. A former editor of Chicago Review, as well as a translator andcritic, he teaches literature and writing at the University of Louisville. makalani bandele is a Louisville native andAffrilachian Poet. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation,Millay Colony, Kentucky Arts Council, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently acandidate for the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky,bandele´s work has been published in several anthologies and widely in literaryjournals. The author of hellfightin´ and under the aegis of a winged mind,awarded the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, poems from under the aegishave been published in Prairie Schooner, 32poems, and North American Review. Mackenzie Berry is from Louisville, Kentucky. Herpoetry has been published in Vinyl, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart, andBlood Orange Review, among others. A graduate of the University ofWisconsin-Madison through the First Wave Program and Goldsmiths, University ofLondon, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Cornell University. Herdebut poetry collection 'Slack Tongue City' is forthcoming from SundressPublications in 2022. You can find her work at mackenzieberry.com. Steve Cambron´s poetry has appeared inLiterary Leo, Word Hotel and Heartland Trail Review and have one two GreenRiver Writers awards. His poetry was choreographed and featured in theLouisville Ballet´s 2018 Choreographer´s Showcase. He is the creator and hostof Flying Out Loud, a monthly reading series featuring some of Louisville´sfinest writers and poets. He is currently working on an MFA at the EasternKentucky University Bluegrass Writer´s Studio. Jeremy Michael Clark´s poems have appeared in WestBranch, Poetry Northwest, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He holds degrees fromthe University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice andRutgers University-Newark, where he received his MFA. Born and raised inLouisville, Kentucky, he is a licensed social worker living in Brooklyn. Bernard Clay is a Louisville, Kentucky, native whogrew up in the shadow of the now demolished Southwick housing projects on the West End of town. He has spent most of his life in Kentucky cultivating anappreciation, over the years, for the state´s disappearing natural wonders andunique but sparse urban areas. âBernard received an MFA in creative writing from the University of KentuckyCreative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective.His work has been published in various journals and anthologies. He currentlyresides on a farm in eastern Kentucky with his wife Lauren. English Lit is hisfirst book. Darcy Cleaver, teacher, poet, and playwright, livesin Louisville, Kentucky with her wife and four dogs. Darcy moved away in the'80s to pursue the gay agenda; she was overjoyed to return years later to amuch more inclusive city. Ron Davis is a poet and visual artist whose narrativeworks range from social commentary to afrofuturism, often intertwining thesocietal with the speculative. a louisville native, he now resides inlexington, ky with his partner Crystal Wilkinson. A native of Louisville´s WestEnd, Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow´sarms, \blak\ \al-fÉ bet\, winner of thePersea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award, and Cooling Board: ALong-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awardnominee. He is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowin poetry, a Cave Canem alum, and Associate Professor of English at IndianaUniversity-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). Hannah Drake is a blogger, activist, public speaker,poet, and author of 11 books. She writes commentary on politics, feminism, andrace and her work has been featured online at Cosmopolitan, The BitterSoutherner, The Lily, Harper´s Bazaar and Revolt TV. Hannah is the author ofseveral works of poetry, Hannah s Plea-Poetry for the Soul, Anticipation, LifeLived In Color, In Spite of My Chains, For Such A Time As This and So ManyThings I Want to Tell You-Life Lessons for the Journey. Hannah was selected asone of the Best of the Best in Louisville, Kentucky for her poem Spaces andrecently was honored as a Kentucky Colonel, the highest title of honor bestowedby the Kentucky Governor recognizing an individual´s noteworthy accomplishmentsand outstanding service to community, state, and nation. In 2021 Hannahwork as an activist and poet was profiled in the New York Times, highlighting her work and the (Un)KnownProject that seeks to recognize the known and unknown names of Black peoplethat were enslaved in Kentucky and throughout the nation. Jessica Farquhar is the author of Dear MotorcycleEnthusiast, a chapbook published by The Magnificent Field in 2020. She holds anMFA from Purdue, where she was the assistant director of Creative Writing. Youcan find her work in recent issues of Can We Have Our Ball Back? and BearReview. Isiah Fish is a queer poet & performer fromLouisville, Kentucky. He holds an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois UniversityCarbondale where he worked as an editor for Crab Orchard Review. His work hasbeen published in Albion Review, Blood Orange Review, Foglifter, & MiracleMonocle. Robin Garner is a spoken word artist, published poet,host & keynote speaker. She utilizes her passion for poetry & spokenword to uplift, encourage and ignite her audience. Inspired by own adversitiesand triumphs, she is best known for her raw, transparent and uncensorednarrative in regards to women and their struggle with loving, living andmaintaining their own identity. Martha Greenwald is the Founding Director of WhoWeLostKY.org, a projectencouraging Kentuckians to write about loved ones lost to Covid-19. She is thewinner of the 2020 Yeats Prize for Poetry. Her first collection of poetry,Other Prohibited Items, was the winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Series.Her work has appeared in such journals as New World Writing, The Threepenny Review,Slate, Poetry, The Sewanee Review and Best New Poets. She has held a WallaceStegner Fellowship at Stanford and been awarded fellowships from the NorthCarolina and Kentucky Arts Councils, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writer´sConferences, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. She taught as an adjunctprofessor for eighteen years at the University of Louisville. David Haydon is a poet and essayist originally fromSpringfield, KY. David is currently a Ph.D. student at the University ofSouthern California, studying nonfiction. David's work explores Southernqueerness, maternity, and significations of the body. David Higdon is a writer from Kentucky. His work hasbeen published or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, Lucky Jefferson, CoffinBell Journal, Naugatuck River Review, and the tiny journal. He is the 2021winner of The Grand Prix Prize from the Kentucky State Poetry Society. He liveswith his family in Louisville, Ky. John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed,2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems appearin Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best AmericanPoetry, and elsewhere. Raised in Louisville, he is pursuing a PhD in English atthe University of California, Berkeley.Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poems and is the editor ofThe Louisville Anthology from Belt Publishing. She is editor in chief at Salon.com and is on the faculty ofSpalding University's School of Creative and Professional Writing. She lives inLouisville. Anna Leigh Knowles is the author of Conditions of TheWounded (Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2021). Her work appears in Blackbird, IndianaReview, Memorious, The Missouri Review Online, Poetry Northwest, RHINO,storySouth, Hunger Mountain, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Tin House Online. Arecipient of an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, she has also receivedscholarships from the Appalachian Writers´ Workshop, Bear River Writers´Workshop, the New Harmony Writers´ Workshop, the San Miguel de Allende Writers´Conference, and a Female Leadership Residency at Omega Institution. She holdsan MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a BA from University ofColorado-Denver. For more information, visit annaleighknowles.com. Kristi Maxwell is the author of seven books of poems,including My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020); Realm Sixty-four, editor's choice forthe Sawtooth Poetry Prize; Hush Sessions, editor's choice for the SaturnaliaBooks Poetry Prize; and Re-, finalist for the National Poetry Series. She's anassociate professor of English at the University of Louisville. Kentucky poet, folklorist, and educator SarahMcCartt-Jackson's work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Indiana Review,Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, Tidal Basin Review, TheLouisville Review, and others. She is the recipient of an Al Smith IndividualArtist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and has served asartist-in-residence for four National Parks: Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia,Catoctin Mountain National Park, and Homestead. She is the author of Stonelight(Airlie Press), which won the Phillip H. McMath Award, Weatherford Award in Poetry,and Airlie Prize. Her chapbooks include Calf Canyon (selected for publicationby Louisville poet Kiki Petrosino), Vein of Stone, and Children Born on theWrong Side of the River. She is an elementary school teacher in JeffersonCounty. Erin L. McCoy holds an MFA in creative writing and anMA in Hispanic studies from the University of Washington. Her work has appearedin the "Best New Poets" anthology twice, selected by Natalie Diaz andKaveh Akbar. She won second place in the 2019-2020 Rougarou Poetry Contest,judged by CAConrad, and is currently a finalist for the Missouri Review´s 2021Miller Audio Prize. Her poetry and fiction have been published or areforthcoming in West Branch, Narrative, Bennington Review, Conjunctions,Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Nimrod International Journal, and other publications. She isfrom Louisville, Kentucky. Her website is erinlmccoy.com. Glenna Meeks is an emerging poet and filmmaker fromLouisville, Kentucky. She lives in NYC and comes back to Louisville yearly. Herpoems have been published in The London Reader and Taunt Magazine. She iswriting a memoir about the people and places that have made her. Sunshine Meyers is a self-professed Louisvillenative, speech-language pathologist, artist, and closet poet. While these titlesmay seem disparate, they each convey her primary passions of communication andself-expression. As a bisexual woman and survivor of long-term abuse with PTSD,Sunshine aims to use her poetry to embolden the voice of others who are all tooused to living in silence. Marta Miranda-Straub is a poet and storyteller whohas spent her life working towards equity and inclusion and advancing socialand economic justice for marginalized communities. She is the author of Cradled bySkeletons: A Life in Poems and Essays (ShadelandhouseModern Press 2019). Until the age of twelve Marta was raised in Pinar del Rio,Cuba. Marta now lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, and she describesherself affectionately as a Cubalachian-a combination of Cuban andAppalachian. She was inducted into the Affrilachian Poets by Frank X Walker in2009. For many years she was the director of the Center for Women &Families in Louisville. Marta is a queer Latinx woman who lives and works atthe intersection of identities, ethnicity, race, gender, andsexualities-applying an intersectional feminist lens to all she does. She hasover forty years of experience in organizational and clinical social workpractice, during which she has held multiple roles, including professor, socialresearcher, author, psychotherapist, executive leader, fundraisingprofessional, community organizer, advocate/activist, executive coach,facilitator, trainer, and public speaker. Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Surrender, apoetry chapbook, Lost Girls, a short story collection, and Abide, a poetrychapbook forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. Her poetry has appeared in TheClackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among otherjournals. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and wasa finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Lance G. Newman is a 'Renaissance Man' who wearsseveral hats; the writer, the poet, the actor, the playwright, the artist, theteacher and the student. He is affectionately refer to as 'Mr. SpreadLove,' andfor the past twenty years, he's been trying to put the l-o-v-e in Louisville. Nguyá»n VÅ© Ngá»c Uyên is a Vietnamese-American immigrant, a social workerand a therapist. She lives in South Louisville with her husband and their twocats and two dogs. The work of Robert L. Penick has appeared in TheLouisville Review, The Pikeville Review, Kudzu, Literary LEO and Trajectorywithin Kentucky, and journals like The Hudson Review, North American Review andPlainsongs without. More of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt PoetrySeries, 2020), selected as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry byU.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She is the recipient of a 2021 NationalEndowment for the Arts fellowship and the 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Centerfellowship, and the winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from theAmerican Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerouspublications, including the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, TheAtlantic, and Kenyon Review among others, as well as in commissions for theMuseum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art(LACMA). Joy is currently an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow and doctoralstudent in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Ryan Ridge was born and raised in Louisville,Kentucky. He is the author of four chapbooks as well as five books, including*New Bad News* (Sarabande Books 2020). His writing has appeared in AmericanBook Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Post Road, Salt Hill,Santa Monica Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. An assistant professor atWeber State University in Ogden, Utah, he codirects the Creative WritingProgram. In addition to his work as a writer and teacher, he edits the literarymagazine Juked, and lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Farmer. Heplays bass in the Snarlin´ Yarns. Alex Shull is a long time Louisvillian, lifelong poetand software developer by trade. Rheonna Nicole is a poet, artist, spoken wordcompetitor and entrepreneur. A native Louisvillian, she graduated from ValleyHigh School and studied commercial arts at Murray State University. Rheonna hasbeen a featured speaker at The National Council of Negro Women's Martin LutherKing Jr. brunch, Girls IdeaFest, World Festival, Kentucky Women's WritersConference, Louisville Literary Arts reading series and Indiana UniversityPoetry Festival. She has been featured in Today's Woman Magazine, Leo Weekly,Insider Louisville, Courier Journal, and Spalding University´s Art &Literary Hotel. In 2016 she competed in the Women of the World Poetry Slam,ranking sixth place amongst 96 other female spoken word artists in the nation.Now a published poet, she has created her own organization called Lipstick WarsPoetry Slam (a partnership with ArtsReach of the Kentucky Center for the Arts),an all-woman poetry slam competition where she offers a platform for poets tospeak out against the injustices and celebrations of womanhood. Aileen Tierney is currently based in Louisville,Kentucky. She holds a BA in English from the University of Kentucky. Alissa Vance is a community activist, poet, andwriter, born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. In her daily life, Alissafights for housing and racial equity, freedom and liberty for all people, andjustice still for Travis Nagdy and Breonna Taylor. Ken Walker is the author of Twenty Glasses of Water(Diez, 2014) and Antworten (Greying Ghost, 2017). His work can be found inBoston Review, Hyperallergic, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Brooklyn Rail,The Seattle Review, Atlas Review, Lumberyard, Tammy, and many otherpublications. Jasmine Wigginton is a youth worker and a writer fromLouisville, Kentucky, and is currently located in Baltimore, Maryland. Throughher writing, she explores intergenerational trauma, her ancestors, and theinherent magic of being Black and from Kentucky.
