Issue #7 Contributors

Christina Mesiti

lives in her converted short bus in order to make work directly within public land throughout the mountain west (and to not pay rent). Her work has been exhibited at UCLA, Cal State Long Beach, Locust Projects, Tyler Park Presents and the Brand Library. She has taught at Pitzer College, Pomona College, Pepperdine University and a truly strange college on a cattle ranch, Deep Springs College. She has attended residencies at Ucross, the Edward Albee Foundation, Township 10, the Vermont Studio Center, and Art Farm and will be at the Galveston Artist Residency this year. In 2020, she co-founded the Emplacement Society, an open collective of people taking trips together outside to experiment with collective, somatic knowledge creation at the intersection of art and the environment.

Joseph Chapman

is a board-certified chaplain, poet, and ordained minister in the Presbyterian (USA) church. He has a bachelor’s degrees in English, creative writing, and philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and master’s degrees in poetry and divinity from the University of Virginia and the San Francisco Theological Seminary. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Boston Review, and Cincinnati Review. He is proud to say that he exclusively attended public schools from preschool to graduate school. Due to natural disasters and an itinerant lifestyle, this is his only surviving school photo.

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Justin Hamm

is the Poet Laureate of Missouri (2025–2027) and a 2026 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. He is the author of five books of poetry, including O Death and Drinking Guinness with the Dead: Poems 2007–2021, as well as the photography collection Midwestern. His work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Poets.org, and numerous other publications and anthologies. Hamm is the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and the founding editor of the museum of americana. A two-time Woody Guthrie Poet, TEDx speaker, photographer, and longtime Missouri educator, he has spent more than twenty years as a public school teacher and librarian. He lives and works in Mexico, Missouri, and his poems and photos draw deeply from the American Midwest.

Karen Finneyfrock

is the author of the poetry collection Ceremony for the Choking Ghost and one of the editors of the poetry anthology Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls, both released by Write Bloody Publishing. She is the author of two young adult novels: The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door and Starbird Murphy and the World Outside, both published by Viking Children’s Books. Find her karenfinneyfrock.com.

Karen Holman

is a 5-time Pushcart nominee, holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MS in Counseling from California State University. Her work appears in Posit, Black Sun, DIAGRAM, MAYDAY and Puerto del Sol among others. Her writing and performances featured in Michigan’s Pencilpoint Theatreworks’ productions. Her chapbook, published in the New Poets, Short Books, IV series, was edited by Marvin Bell. She’s served several literary magazines, recently december magazine. Website: karenholmanworks.com.

Katie Hartsock's

second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse), received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize. Her work appears in journals such as Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Image, Tupelo Quarterly, New Verse Review, and RHINO. A limited-edition letterpress chapbook, Love-Gifts To Be Delivered Via Subterranean Rivers, is out from Aureole Press. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.

Lauren Camp

is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Kenyon Review, and The Missouri Review and elsewhere. Honors include an Academy of American Poets fellowship, a Dorset Prize, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. She served as Poet Laureate of New Mexico from 2022-2025.

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Mike Santora

(he/him) is a Midwest poet born and raised in Northeast Ohio. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of the chapbook, Sugarflood, (Finishing Line Press) and the full-length collection Minimum Safe Distance (Main Street Rag). He no longer wears this much silk. He still love lasers.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

is a former high school drop out, back in the 1900s. No joke! His twenty-first book is a collaboration with Jeremy Shraffenberger Dueling Shovels published by the University of Northern Iowa’s First Thursday Press. He works as a Carer and Med Tech for folks with traumatic brain injuries along Lake Erie.

Sehee S. Oh

is a poet currenly based in Seattle, WA. She grew up in Seoul, South Korea, but considers Northeast Ohio home. She is an MFA student at University of Washington and studied literary arts at Brown University. Her recent work can be found in Mudroom, The Broadkill Review, and others.

Zach Savich's

latest books are the work of nonfiction Études for the Image, or The Cinder Path (Salon des Refusés/Green Linden, 2026), the critical-memoir-for-performance A Field of Telephones (53rd State, 2025), and the poetry collection Momently (Black Ocean, 2024). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art and with the PhD in Creativity at Rowan University.