CHIRPS FROM THE SPARROW
POETRY
Our National Treasure
The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
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Awakening at Three in the Morning, William Fabrycki
Welfare Fraud, Robert Joe Stout
Fear of Entropy, Isabel Miles
The Reinvention of Love, Kosrof Chantikian
Returning #2, Sharon Venezio
The Dwelling No Longer Mentions Its Fresh Coat of Paint, Rich Ives
Three Poems: The Mary, Passing Through, Midday, Jane Frank
Navy Rum, Michael Collins
Mining in the Night Sky, Jo Barbara Taylor
The Rape of Nanking, Matt Duggan
The Factory, Saddiq Dzukogi
A Sheepskin is More than a Diploma and Less than a Diplomat, Patrick Theron Erickson
Constance, Mona T. Lydon-Rochelle
Five Journal Entries, Don Mager
At Fifty-Eight, Terry Martin
Unholy Days, Ogana D. Okpah
Coy Rays…, Bam Dev Sharma
At the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time Where the Roads Fork, David Adès
The Doppelganger Effect, Ron Singer
Hog Creek, Seth Copeland
Breath, Richard Widerkehr
Marie Said, Thomas R. Smith
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry four times. He also won the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960. The rugged life of a farmer in New England was woven through many of his poems.
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David Adès is a Pushcart Prize nominated Australian poet who has lived in Pittsburgh since 2011. He has been a member of Friendly Street Poets since 1979. He is the author of Mapping the World (Friendly Street Poets / Wakefield Press, 2008) commended for the Anne Elder Award 2008, and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal (Garron Publishing, 2015). David was a volunteer editor at the Australian Poetry Members Anthology Metabolism. His poems have appeared widely in publications and literary magazines including over 20 of the Friendly Street Readers, His work has also been anthologized, most recently in Verse Envisioned: Poems from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and Works of Art They Have Inspired. In 2014 David was awarded the inaugural University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize.
Kosrof Chantikian is the author of two books of poems: Imaginations & Self Discoveries and Prophecies & Transformations. He is also the editor of Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet and The Other Shore: 100 Poems by Rafael Alberti. His poems have appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Snow Jewel, Verse Wisconsin, Amerus, Green House, and other journals. He was editor of KOSMOS: A Journal of Poetry, and general editor of the KOSMOS Modern Poets in Translation Series. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and San Francisco Foundation, and he was poet-in-residence at the San Francisco Public Library.
Michael Collins is a Jamaica-born writer who has published a book of poems, The Traveling Queen (Sheep Meadow Press); an intellectual biography and Understanding Etheridge Knight (University of South Carolina Press,) as well as a novel chapter and many essays. He teaches at Texas A & M University.
Seth Copeland is an English graduate of Cameron University, where he worked on two literary journals, The Oklahoma Review and The Goldmine. He is now pursuing an MFA at the University of Central Oklahoma. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Otoliths, Crab Fat, Menacing Hedge andGarbanzo, among others.
Matt Duggan was born in Bristol in 1971. He is the winner of the erbacce prize for poetry, 2015. His poems have appeared in The Journal, Sarasvati, The Seventh Quarry, Lunar Poetry Magazine, Harbinger Asylum, Poetry Quarterly, Illumen, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Yellow Chair Review, Page and Spine, Section 8, Pageand Ink Zine. His prize winning collection, Dystopia 38.10, will be published by Erbacce Press this December.
Saddiq Dzukogi is the author of three poetry collections. Works have appeared or are forthcoming in Afridiaspora, Elsewhere: New African Poetry Section, Ofi Press, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, The Bombay Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, Off the Coast, among others. Dzukogi is also the poetry editor at Expound and received a 2016 Pushcart Prize Nomination.
Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. Secretariat is his mentor, though he has never been an achiever and has never gained on the competition. He resonates with a friend’s definition of change (albeit a bit dated): change coming at us a lot faster because you can punch a whole lot more, a whole lot faster down digital broadband “glass” fiber than an old copper co-axial landline cable. Of late Erickson’s work has appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review, Cobalt Review, Poetry Pacific, Red Fez, Literary Juice, and Poetry Quarterly,among others, and will appear in Danse Macabre in the Fall 2015 issue of The Penwood Review.
William Fabrycki is a retired art history professor and artist, as well as a much published poet. He also has a degree in screen writing.
Jane Frank’s poems have been published in the Australian Poetry Journal and the Bimblebox Art Project in Australia, Skylark Review, and Southlight Magazine in the UK. Jane teaches a range of writing disciplines at Griffith University in both Brisbane and on the Gold Coast. She has just completed a PhD examining the rise of the global Book Town Movement.
Rich Ives is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award for Bitter Oleander and has been nominated twice for the Best of the Web, three times for Best of the Net, and six times for the Pushcart Prize. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a work for each day of the year, is available from Silenced Press, Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, is available from Newer York Press, Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, is available from Bitter Oleander Press, and his story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, is now available from What Books.
Mona T. Lydon-Rochelle lives in the Pacific Northwest where she is an avid forager. She has published one poetry chapbook, Mourning Dove (Finishing Line Press 2014.) Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Spiritus, Antigonish, JAMA, Journal of Medical Humanities, Santa Fe Literary Journal, Floating Bridge Review, Xavier, The Merton Seasonal, and elsewhere. She has been a professor at the University of Washington and University of College Cork Ireland, and she volunteers for Médecins Sans Frontières.
Don Mager’s chapbooks and volumes of poetry are: To Track the Wounded One, Glosses, That Which is Owed to Death, Borderings, Good Turns, The Elegance of the Ungraspable, Birth Daybook, Drive Time, and Russian Riffs. He is retired. He was the Mott University Professor of English at Johnson C. Smith University from 1998-2004 where he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters (2005-2011). Along with a number of scholarly articles, he has published over 200 poems and translations from German, Czech and Russian. He lives in Charlotte, NC.
Terry Martin, an English Professor at Central Washington University, has published hundreds of poems, articles, and essays and has edited journals, books, and anthologies. Her new book of poems, The Light You Find was published by Blue Begonia Press late in 2014. She lives in Yakima, Washington—The Fruit Bowl of the Nation.
Isabel Miles is a Scot living in the North Yorkshire Moors. Before retiring to write full-time she was a scientist and technical manager and she has a PhD in Chemistry and many technical publications. She has had work published in the on-line magazines WTD, The View from Here, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, and in the print magazine Shooter. One of her poems was shortlisted for the 2015 Keats-Shelley Prize, and another was longlisted in the Carillon Sonnets competition. She has just completed her first novel. In her spare time she reads, gardens, practices yoga and walks on the moors. She enjoys reading her work at local open-mic nights.
Ogana D. Okpah is an undergraduate of Plant Science and Biotechnology and a 22 year old Nigerian who is obsessed with writing and the arts. His works have been featured in The Provo Canyon Review, Tuck Magazine, Ashvamegh Journal, The Rising Phoenix Review and a few others. He has works fourth coming in Synchronised Chaos and Sentinel Literary Quarterly.
Poetry by Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net) has appeared in many publications. His collection of Maine poems, Look to Mountains, Look to Sea (River Otter Press August 2013,) garnered a Pushcart nomination and was named “best chapbook” by The Aurorean. His eighth book, Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders was published Feb. 1, 2015 (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press) and can be found in many college and university libraries. “Unusual, even Anomalous” is the latest in a series of loose sonnets that Singer has written over the last five or six years.
Bam Dev Sharma is a joint author, with the American poet Martina Reis Newberry, of a collection of poetry, Bunyan and Alder. His poems have appeared in journals such as Jelly Fish Whispers and Tintota, Ginyu. Some of his poems are slated to be published soon in Japanese. Sharma teaches English and currently heads the English department at the Campus of International Languages. He was awarded a six-month writing residency fellowship in South Korea.
Thomas R. Smith is the author of seven books of poetry: Keeping the Star, Horse of Earth, The Dark Indigo Current, Winter Hours, Waking Before Dawn, The Foot of the Rainbow, and The Glory (forthcoming in 2015 from Red Dragonfly Press). He has edited several books, including What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread: Poems by Alden Nowlan and, most recently, Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer. He is a poetry instructor at the Loft Literary Center and lives in River Falls, Wisconsin with his wife, Krista. He posts essays and poems on his web site: http://www.thomasrsmithpoet.com
Robert Joe Stout lives and writes in Oaxaca, Mexico. His poetry and fiction have appeared over the years in Four Quarters, The New Orleans Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Interim, Chiron Review, Illya’s Honey, Southwest Review, Third Wednesday, Exit 13, North American Review, Abbey and The Cape Rock, among many other journals and magazines.
Jo Barbara Taylor lives near Raleigh, NC. Her poems and academic writing have appeared in journals, magazines, anthologies, and online. Four chapbooks include Cameo Roles from Big Table Publishing, 2011 and High Ground from Main Street Rag, 2013. A full-length collection is forthcoming from Chatter House Press in 2016. She is a freelance editor and writing coach, leads poetry workshops for OLLI through Duke Continuing Education, chairs the Brockman-Campbell Book Award for the North Carolina Poetry Society and coordinates a poetry reading series for a local bookstore.
Sharon Venezio is the author of The Silence of Doorways (March 2013, Moon Tide Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Bellevue Literary Review, and Reed. She is also featured in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond as well as the anthology Stone, River, Sky: an Anthology of Georgia Poems. She lives in Los Angeles where she works as a behavior analyst specializing in autism. Read more at sharonvenezio.com
Richard Widerkehr received his M.A. from Columbia University and won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. He has two book-length collections of poems: The Way Home (Plain View Press) and Her Story of Fire (Egress Studio Press). Tarragon Books published his novel, Sedimental Journey,about a geologist in love with a fictional character. Recent work has appeared in Rattle, Floating Bridge Review, Cirque, Penumbra, Clay Bird Review, and Salt River Review. He’s one of the poetry readers for Shark Reef Review.
Marie Sheppard Williams lived and worked in Minnesota all her life. She won many awards for her writing, including two Pushcart Prizes and a Bush Artist Fellowship. Among her publications are “The Worldwide Church of the Handicapped,” “The Weekend Girl,” “The Soap Game,” “Stories for the Child,” “Us,” and The Best Cat, a book of poems with illustrations by her daughter, Megan Williams. Williams passed away December 14th, 2015. All her works may be obtained at Amazon.com. We miss you.
Grey Sparrow Journal 