GREY SPARROW’S NATIONAL TREASURE FOR THE SUMMER OF 2022
“Ada Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022. Limón is the author of the poetry collections The Hurting Kind (2022, Milkweed Editions); The Carrying (2018, Milkweed Editions), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things (2015, Milkweed Editions), a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Sharks in the Rivers (2010, Milkweed Editions); Lucky Wreck (2005, Autumn House Press, reissued 2021); and This Big Fake World (2005, Pearl Editions),” as noted from the Poetry Foundation.
BIOGRAPHIES
Mikki Aronoff’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Intima, Thimble Literary Magazine, London Reader, SurVision, Rogue Agent, Popshot Quarterly, The South Shore Review, The Fortnightly Review, Feral, The Phare, Sledgehammer Lit, Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, Emerge, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart and Best Microfiction nominations.
Debbie Benson’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2013, Mid-American Review, Radar Poetry, Antioch Review, and other journals. Awards include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (Southern California Review), Vern Cowles Prize for a Trinity of Poems (Southeast Missouri State University Press), and third prize in the William Matthews Poetry Contest (Asheville Poetry Review). She was longlisted in the Poetry Society of the UK’s National Poetry Competition. She lives in NYC and works as a clinical psychologist.
Shiva Bhusal currently lives in Bellevue, Washington, and works as a software engineer. His writing has been previously published in the Kathmandu Post, South Florida Poetry Journal, Of Nepalese Clay, and Grey Sparrow Journal.
Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilarations of short fiction, with more than fifty pieces published in Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review, and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).
L B Chhetri is a retired Professor of Tribhuwan University and loves writing short stories and poems. His five books published so far are; one poetry collection BHEED MA HARAYEKO M ANCHHE (A Man Lost in a Crowd,) three short story collections; TRISHANKU KO DESHMA (Off to Trishanku’s Country) INDRAMAYA KO DESHMA (Off to the Country of Indramay), and BRATBHANG (Breaking Fast). He also has one English book, The Corridor of Senses, that contains poems and stories. Chhetri is President of the Kavi Danda Literary Society and Chief Editor of Charaiveti, a literary magazine. [Editor’s Note: Grey Sparrow Journal is honored to publish his writing.]
Chris Daly resides on the West Coast, USA, and has been in the life for some decades. He has published in various smaller circulation magazines and journals. Daly has completed an experimental oral history of an ancient period of Viet Nam.
In 2016, John Delaney moved out to Port Townsend, WA, after retiring as curator of historic maps at Princeton University. He’s traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings, and is addicted to kayaking and hiking. In 2017, John published Waypoints, a collection of place poems. Twenty Questions, a chapbook, appeared in 2019, and Delicate Arch, poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, came out this year. The work of John and his son, Andrew, appearing in this issue, are part of a chapbook about Galápagos wildlife they hope to publish soon. They made an extensive trip to the archipelago in 2021.
Anne Dreyer is a poet, classical vocalist, and mother who loves the intersection of poetry and music. She writes of the natural world, ancestry, and the everyday. Her work is forthcoming in Wood Cat Review. As a singer, she has performed at numerous venues across the United States, including the Kennedy Center under the baton of Lorin Maazel. She lives in Westchester, New York with her husband, their two children, and Violet, a golden retriever.
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. Besides a forthcoming chapbook, Better Late Than Never (The Orchard Street Press, 2022,)his work has appeared in Quiet Diamonds: The poetry journal of The Orchard Street Press, Summer 2021, and in Grey Sparrow Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, among other publications, and more recently in Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, The Charles Carter, and Shift.
A retired special education teacher, Vern Fein has published over two hundred poems on over ninety sites, a few being: *82 Review, Bindweed Magazine, Gyroscope Review, Courtship of Winds, Young Raven’s Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Monterey Poetry Review, and Poesis. His first poetry book—I WAS YOUNG AND THOUGHT IT WOULD CHANGE—was published by Cyberwit Press.
Chitra Gopalakrishnan, a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communications consultant, uses her ardor for writing, wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript and tree-ism and capitalism.
Pat Hanahoe-Dosch’s poems have been published in The Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, The Atticus Review, Panoplyzine, Confrontation, Rust + Moth, American Literary Review, Apple Valley Review, The Red River Review, San Pedro River Review, Apt, among many others. Her books of poems, The Wrack Line, and Fleeing Back, can be found on Amazon.com or the FutureCycle Press website.
Jenny Hockey’s poems range from the sad to the surreal to the celebratory. She trained as an anthropologist and still takes an oblique view of the ups and downs of everyday lives, her own included. She retired from Sheffield University, UK, as Emeritus Professor of Sociology to write and read more poetry. Her research interests included shoes and identity, along with death, memory, landscape, and loss, all of which now inspire her poetry. Online, her poems appear in Grey Squirrel; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Morphrog; One Hand Clapping; Streetcake; The High Window; The Lake; and Toasted Cheese. In 2013 she received a New Poets Award from New Writing North and in 2019 launched her debut collection, Going to Bed with the Moon (Oversteps Books, overstepsbooks.com). jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk
Anna Idelevich is a scientist by profession, Ph.D., MBA, trained in the neuroscience field at Harvard University. She writes poetry for pleasure. Her books and poetry collections include DNA of the Reversed River and Cryptopathos published by the Liberty Publishing House, NY. Anna’s poems were featured in Louisville Review, BlazeVOX, The Racket, Bourgeon Magazine, Running Wild Press, Zoetic Press, among others. We hope you will enjoy their melody and new linguistic tone with a slight tint of an accent.
Paul Ilechko is a British/American poet. Born in South Yorkshire, he now lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Louisiana Literature, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sleet Magazine, and Book of Matches. His first album, Meeting Points, was released in 2021.
Marc Janssen started writing many novels but didn’t finish any of them. He’s a sprinter. Janssen did complete a poetry collection, November Reconsidered, published by Cirque Press. His verse can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast and Poetry Salzburg. Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly reading, and was a 2020 nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.
Veronica Klash loves living in Las Vegas and writing in her living room. She is a Folio Award-winning essayist. Her fiction has been anthologized most recently in What I Thought of Ain’t Funny, a collection inspired by the comedy of the late Mitch Hedberg. You can read her flash fiction in Wigleaf, X-Ray Lit, and Cheap Pop, among others. Her work has been featured in the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Veronica is working on a short story collection set in Las Vegas. Find her tweets @veronicaklash.
Native to Missouri, Nicholas Kriefall’s first collection of poems, Attic Pieces, was published in 2014 by Unsolicited Press. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Conium Review, Poetry Quarterly, Enizagam, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Writing Tomorrow, The Healing Muse, and is forthcoming in two reviews, Evening Street and Concho River. He resides in St. Louis.
Bonnie McClellan is an English teaching assistant living in Hamburg, Germany. She began writing poetry about the trash in Philadelphia while a student at Temple University. She enjoys observing trash and discovering the patterns of German trash (Haribo wrappers, cigarette boxes, etc.) [Editor’s Note: This is Poet McClellan’s first publication.]
Mark Mazzoli lives in Syracuse, NY. His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Lotus-eater, Seneca Review, Bombay Gin, Otis Nebula, and Structo, along with numerous other magazines.
Frank C. Modica is a cancer survivor and retired teacher from Urbana, Illinois, who taught children with special needs for over 34 years. When he isn’t writing poetry, creative nonfiction, or flash fiction stories, he’s riding a bicycle or volunteering with various community agencies. His writing is animated by interests in history, geography, spirituality, and sociology. Frank’s first chapbook, What We Harvest, nominated for an Eric Hoffer book award, was published this past fall by Kelsay Books. His short story “Homemade” was selected as an Honorable Mention in the Midway Journal 2017 -1000 Below Flash Prose and Poetry contest. His poem “Rainbow Bus” was the 2017 Champaign-Urbana Metropolitan Transit District Poem Contest winner and was featured on all the local buses for a month. Frank’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Grey Sparrow, Front Porch Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, 101 Words, Plum Tree Tavern, Bluepepper, and Anti-Heroin Chic.
James B. Nicola’s seven full-length poetry collections (2014-2022) are Manhattan Plaza, Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater, Wind in the Cave, Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists, Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond, Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, and Turns & Twists (just out). His poetry and prose have appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal; the Antioch, Southwest, Green Mountains, and Atlanta Reviews; Rattle; Barrow Street; Tar River; and Poetry East, garnering two Willow Review awards, a Dana Literary award, eight Pushcart nominations, a Best of the Net nom, a Rhysling nom, plus a People’s Choice award from Storyteller magazine, for which he feels both stunned and grateful. His theater career culminated in his nonfiction book Playing the Audience, which won a Choice award. A graduate of Yale, he hosts the Hell’s Kitchen International Writers’ Roundtable at his local library branch in Manhattan: walk-ins welcome.
Patrick Parks is author of the novel Tucumcari and has had fiction, poetry, reviews and interviews appear in a number of places, including Southeast Review, Six Sentences, Another Chicago Magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, OxMag, and elsewhere (the adverb, not the publication). He is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, a recipient of two Illinois Arts Council artist grants, and lives with his wife and requisite cats near Chicago. More at patrick-parks.com
Jennifer M. Phillips is an immigrant, an Episcopal Priest, a gardener, grower of Bonsai, and painter, and has been writing poetry and prose since the age of seven. She has lived in five states and two countries, and is now at home on Cape Cod. She has won several poetry awards and published work in over 50 journals. Her chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (blurb.com, 2019) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, forthcoming, Fall 2022).
After years of impersonating a systems engineer, Ken Poyner has retired to watch his wife continue to break national and world raw powerlifting records. They travel lazily between sites of powerlifting or literary interest. Ken’s four current poetry and four short fiction collections are available from Amazon and just about everywhere else. He has appeared in Analog, The Iowa Review, Furious Gazelle, and many other places. www.kpoyner.com
Caroline Reddy’s work has been accepted or published in Active Muse, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, Braided Way, Calliope, Clinch, International Human Rights Arts Festival, and Star*Line, among others. In the fall of 2021, her poem “A Sacred Dance”was nominated for the Best of The Net prize by Active Muse. A native of Shiraz, Iran, Caroline is working on a collection of poems titled Star Being, which chronicles the life of a Starseed on earth.
Laura Ann Reed received a dual BA in French/Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently completed master’s degree programs in the performing arts and psychology. She was a dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to assuming the role of leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She and her husband now reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and has appeared in Loch Raven, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, and Willawaw, among other journals.
Tessa Ellison Rossi is a writer, teacher, and recovering attorney who holds a very recent MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a third dan in taekwondo. She has words forthcoming in Red Ogre Review. She’s @TRossiWriter.
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam, and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Ian C. Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, and Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
Nominated for the National Book Award and twice-nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of twenty-seven books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction and Best of the Net nominee, he is widely published in print and online. His first collection of poems, Juice, was published by Regal House Publishing. A second collection of prose poems, Nowhere Now Here, was published by Radial Books. He writes from Pennsylvania. Visit him at https://www.charlesspringer.com.
Jim Tilley has published three full-length collections of poetry (In Confidence, Cruising at Sixty to Seventy, Lessons from Summer Camp) and a novel (Against the Wind) with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. He has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Robert Tremmel lives and writes in Ankeny, Iowa. He’s published poems and academic articles in a wide range of journals, and has published five collections of poetry, including The Records of Kosho the Toad (Bottom Dog Press, 2018). His most recent collection is The Return of the Naked Man (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), which won the Brick Road Poetry Prize.
John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize. His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A twenty-seven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.
Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Banyan Review, Gargoyle Magazine, The Inflectionist Review, Talking River Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.
Cactus Cradle Poetry Contributors below [Video now retired.]
Diana Marie Delgado is the author of the chapbook Late Night Talks with Men I think I Trust (Center for the Book Arts, 2015) and Tracing the Horse (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019). A National Endowment for the Arts fellow and recipient of numerous scholarships and grants, she currently resides in Tucson where she is the Literary Director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. She holds MFA degrees in poetry from both Columbia University and the University of California, Riverside.
Sarah Kortemeier is a poet and librarian living in Tucson, Arizona. Her debut collection, Ganbatte, won the Felix Pollak Prize in 2019 from the University of Wisconsin Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Science, both from The University of Arizona. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fairy Tale Review, Sentence, and The Feminist Wire, among others. She currently serves as library director at The University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Bojan Louis (Diné) is the author of the poetry collection Currents (BkMk Press 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona (The Guillotine Series 2012). He is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing and American Indian Studies programs at the University of Arizona.
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