Laura E. Garrard is a CranioSacral Therapist on the Olympic Peninsula. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Bellevue Literary Review, Amethyst, The Madrona Project,Silver Birch, and Pangryus. Her chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, is available through Finishing Line Press. Winner of the Merit Prize for the 2024 Stories That Need to be Told Contest and Pushcart Prize nominee with TulipTree Publishing, she has also been a finalist for the John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She’s written a series, Poetry That Fits, on Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org and holds a master’s degree in journalism. Reach her at: LauraEGarrard.com Photo credit: Amy Collett
Note: See also “A Conversation with Laura E. Garrard,” Lauren Davis in conversation with Laura E. Garrard,author of Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death,Finishing Line Press, 2026
Load-Bearing Walls, by Linda B. Myers Published by Finishing Line Press, 2026 Semi-finalist, 2025 Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Contest Review by Laura E. Garrard
Linda B. Myers is among the poets in my Port Angeles, Washington circle. Still, we were surprised to learn that we both had entered Finishing Line Press’ 2025 Open Chapbook Competition and were offered contracts. Since then, we’ve learned more about one another, though, honestly, I had appreciated her debut poetry collection, Load-Bearing Walls, before I learned that she is as candid and clever as her poetry. The author of ten novels now gifts readers with this moving, hard-hitting chapbook.
Myers dedicates her book to the “load-bearing walls [that] support one another” but told viewers (during an interview filmed in December 2025), that these supports “may not be the best for you.” This points to the type of stories that show up in this collection of well-crafted, achingly honest poems. The first lines of the title poem read “Consider my starting point: / Body beached wreckage, knee bent as driftwood.”
In Load-Bearing Walls, Myers describes the challenges of caretaking, dealing with dying friends and spouse, bodily and mental disease, environmental fire catastrophes, and aging. Myers uses humor, ire, and wit to breathe into grief. She also includes narratives from earlier times. The poems are free verse except for one stunning, coming-of-age pantoum, titled, “Autumn of ’63,” in which she seamlessly intertwines Kennedy’s assassination with the “innocence that died that day on a grassy knoll.” A young feminist-in-the-making appears in a childhood story about cowboy films in “Saddle Up”; and camaraderie leaning toward “seduction” with a male colleague, shows up in “Rainmakers.”
When I interviewed Myers, I learned that she’d led a successful advertising and marketing career during the Madman era, a time when women more often became teachers or secretaries. This experience appears in “Rainmakers,” a poem with stanzas headed with slogans, such as “Business sense is real.” She writes, “Like traveling preachers we led them to the promised land, / the heights of business class where they so longed to belong.” A physical line isn’t crossed on business trips, but readers feel the tension between the two characters in this line, “Skin electric to each other’s gesture . . .”
Myers’ work speaks to those who’ve been traumatized like myself (I have been dealing with a chronic blood cancer) by affirming that we aren’t alone and using eloquent language, images, and descriptions to do so. I wanted to sit beside “Watermelon Girl” on the concrete and cry with her when, exhausted from caretaking, she opens her car hatch only for a watermelon to roll onto the driveway and split open. In this poem, Meyers writes, “I’m too hot, too tired till crows scold me to move.” Yet, “the storm passes” and she eats the center of the melon with her hands, “sticky juice drizzling down my chin, / consuming the heart like a hunter.” I found Watermelon Girl’s strength to carry on inspiring: “Wiping my fingers on my cotton shirt I bend, / lift the grocery bags and climb the stairs.”
Myers’ collection includes a series of elegies with endearing descriptions such as Barry’s “XL essence” in the poem “Phone Ghost.” Myers further writes,
He was immense cedar strong a bellow of laughter his chosen song.
One of my favorite poems in the book, “21,000 Days,” reflects on the passing of Myers’ mother. In the poem, the narrator visits her mother’s coffin containing the departed’s daily dairies, which speak to her: “She breathes her memories into my heart.” In an action of self-grace, the narrator decides to remove the twelve dairies and “carry her history home,” by saving words that should not “be buried alive, these words that outlast writers.”
Myers elegizes her husband in several poems. A startling confession in the short poem, “Bedtime,” is “If you should die before I wake, / I will not pray for you.” In “An Unkindness of Words,” she offers a rebuttal after the death. To his words, “I don’t love you anymore,” the caretaker retorts, “I am crazed as an old enamel vase laced with blue veins, / but the vessel and I both still hold water.” Finally, the poet tenderly memorializes her husband with the release of his ashes in “Peninsula Currents”:
He dances invisibly in the fiber of this nurturing land. He’ll not leave nor will I a place with greater sense of found than lost.
Collectively, these poems show how our support for one another is the most important source of love that we can rely on in a world that is “caging brown babies” (in, “Load-Bearing Walls”). Frustration is evident in the lines, “I shake my arthritic fist until even I / am tired of me.” The poem poses that a “way to someplace new” might be a “Sanctuary for old women” who “listen, / take strength from those overcoming damage.”
Whether found riding on the back of a scooter in Hawaii or attending jury duty in a small town in Washington, the stories in Load-Bearing Walls, light “campfires,” that show how the “rise” of the “thing with feathers … hasn’t flown from us yet.”
Linda B. Myers traded snow boots for rain boots and moved from a marketing career in Chicago to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula where she is now part of the Old Growth. She has Indy published ten novels, writes a monthly op/ed piece for the Sequim Gazette, and is a co-founder of Olympic Peninsula Authors, a group devoted to promoting the many fine authors out here in the wild. Load-Bearing Walls from Finishing Line Press is her first poetry chapbook. Her poetry has also appeared in Cirque Literary Journal of the Pacific North Rim, Poetry Breakfast, Unleash Lit, Empty Bowl’s Madrona Series, and several other anthologies. Reach her at: LindaBMyers.com. Photo credit: Donna Whichell
Laura E. Garrard is a CranioSacral Therapist on the Olympic Peninsula. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Bellevue Literary Review, Amethyst, The Madrona Project,Silver Birch, and Pangryus. Her chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, is available through Finishing Line Press. Winner of the Merit Prize for the 2024 Stories That Need to be Told Contest and Pushcart Prize nominee with TulipTree Publishing, she has also been a finalist for the John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She’s written a series, Poetry That Fits, on Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org and holds a master’s degree in journalism. Reach her at: LauraEGarrard.com Photo credit: Amy Collett
Note: See also “A Conversation with Laura E. Garrard,” Lauren Davis in conversation with Laura E. Garrard,author of Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death,Finishing Line Press, 2026
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
Lauren Davis in conversation with Laura E. Garrard, author of Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, Finishing Line Press, 2026
Lauren Davis: Congratulations on the publication of your debut chapbook Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death (Finishing Line Press, 2026), which the poet Tess Gallagher has called “a true teaching of how to live daily on the shifting edge of our own mortality and that of those we love.” Truly, this is a book that looks impermanence straight on. Can you tell us a little bit about how this book came to be?
Laura E. Garrard: This book is an offspring of a full-length poetry memoir about my initial cancer experience (2020-23) interspersed with nature-focused poems. Poems appear in this book that were not part of the full-length narrative, some of them having been published. A number received repeated comments about how readers related to them, regardless if they had cancer or not. The book begins with the title poem “Paddling the Sweet Spot”—which addresses the fleeting balance of flowing smoothly in life’s waters (“the sweet spot not easy to maintain”) and, I think, the crux of a cancer experience (the balance of being responsible and accepting within the medical realm but also remaining hopeful and true to oneself). From here, the poems proceed according to my emotional progression.
Readers may notice how my thoughts about my own death evolve from shock, to grief, and to acceptance of it as a natural cycle alongside living, playing, and observing. The reader travels with the speaker through this arc of the book and her observations of and participation in nature. Living in the present, sharing grief with one another, and loving, are the speaker’s priorities as a living person who is also dying. We are all simultaneously living and dying, no matter how quickly or slowly death comes. Why fear what is inevitable and spend precious energy on worry? Notice how the barn swallows play as the sun sets, how feeding and nurturing the next generations consume them. Notice how salmon give themselves to death even as they lay and fertilize eggs. Are they focused on birth or death? Most likely birth.
Living in the present, sharing grief with one another, and loving, are the speaker’s priorities as a living person who is also dying.
LD: In your poem “Sailing in the Sunshine,” which explores the “sweet spot of flow called letting go” between will and acceptance, you mention “the peaceful present.” Could you speak to your process of letting go when writing poetry and publishing a book, and how the present moment informed that process?
LEG: Interesting questions. The incentives to submit poems for publication and to present a chapbook are two-fold. I have always desired to be published and share my writing, and I want to provide a voice on behalf of those who face similar challenges. These poems have been instrumental as I learned from indelible moments. I believe others may feel validated.
Launching my work into the public realm is a type of letting go. I had to let go of pride, self-protection, and some of my privacy. I thought long about how I might feel reading these poems to others in person and how others may respond. I tested the waters locally as a featured author for Olympic Peninsula Authors’ Open Mic and determined I could bring these messages without causing myself mental and emotional harm or breaking down while reading them. I found myself resilient and others very receptive. The poems aren’t all tearjerkers, mind you. Some are very uplifting and joyful, strong and irreverent. But I lived through these moments, and they challenged me.
Becoming published is service both to myself (sharing experiences and achieving a dream) and to others (offering my voice and circumstances for a shared identity). Opening myself up to rejection in the submission process requires present-mindedness. The focus needs to be on what comes, not on what doesn’t come. This process of patience isn’t easy, especially with such heartfelt material. Not taking things personally is a form of letting go. This is a lesson I aim to learn.
LD: Where did you find inspiration while compiling these poems? Did you turn to any specific authors or books?
LEG: Inspiration spilled from my cancer experience and the weight of a possible decreased lifespan. Nature and its beings speak to me as well, tell me to become present and turn off churning thoughts. I am living in the moment when I cast my gaze upward, climb into a tree, and seek the sublime, like the joyful antics of dolphins and barn swallows at play. I awoke in the middle of the night composing the poem about the life of a rock, “A Life Worth Remembering.” I wrote the entire poem within my mind before rising from bed and composing it again on the computer. I wrote “The Only Else There Is, the Breath” after crying on my shins on the cold brick, begging healing from God. When the tears dried, I came off the floor and began doing Qi Gong. This was a survival instinct to move past a moment of despair. I have lived these moments, and they seemed important to record.
I have lived these moments, and they seemed important to record.
The poetry muse lives within the poet artist, and I don’t always know how a poem came to me, just that it’s here—a thought, a recognition, a personal revelation. Poems seem to have their own lives that poets capture and hone. Poets don’t create in a vacuum, however. Certainly, my writing groups influenced my work, especially an ongoing workshop with poet Gary Copeland Lilley. This chapbook’s poems are flavored through my mentors from Centrum workshops as well. I have studied with Holly J. Hughes, Tess Gallagher, Alice Derry, Matthew Olzmann, CMarie Fuhrman, Claudia Castro Luna, and others. Their classroom reading selections influenced my work, no doubt, but I haven’t emulated a particular poet or style.
The title, “Homage to My Radiated Hip,” shouts out to Lucille Clifton, whose concise work and hard-hitting subjects I admire. Ultimately, though, I believe these poems are written in my unique voice, an upwelling from personal fear, loss, and relief.
LD: If you could leave your reader with one final thought or word, what would it be?
LEG: I hope that readers reduce their fear in relation to dying and become inspired to stand against ableism, or discrimination against those with illness or disabilities. I did not share my work to receive responses of “how sad” but for potentially “how inspiring.” I’ve already been through these moments. I do not dwell on my death date, an unknown to all of us. I am not interested in sympathy. I am interested in others receiving validation through reading my collection, and to further understanding of the emotions that come with being diagnosed with a terminal or chronic disease and dealing with the stigmas of having cancer.
I did not share my work to receive responses of “how sad” but for potentially “how inspiring.”
When we share openly, we gain strength in our experiences rather than feeling alone in them. I would encourage readers to embrace trust within the unknown as best they can, and let that steer them rather than fear. This is not an aim toward perfection but a returning to, again and again. My wake-up call may serve others. When I reread this collection and my full-length book, I am reminded of the gift of raw uncertainty, the lack of security, which drives the ability to live in the present through heightened observation.
Laura E. Garrard is a CranioSacral Therapist on the Olympic Peninsula. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Bellevue Literary Review, Amethyst, The Madrona Project,Silver Birch, and TulipTree Review. Her chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, is available through Finishing Line Press. Winner of the Merit Prize for the 2024 Stories That Need to be Told Contest with TulipTree Publishing, she has also been a finalist for the John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She writes a series, Poetry That Fits, on Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism. Learn more at LauraEGarrard.com.
Lauren Davis is the author of The Nothing (YesYes Books), Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), When I Drowned, and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent, The Missing Ones, and Sivvy. She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars.
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
Kubra, a seeker of stories, has completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s in English Language and Literature from Kashmir University. Her work across corporate and teaching spaces has enriched the clarity with which she reads and writes. She has taught English Literature at the postgraduate level and contributed to research and editorial projects. In addition, leading a team of creative writers, gave her the fulfilling experience of guiding a diverse group of writers from across the world. Rooted in Kashmir and deeply in love with writing, she dreams of crafting a book someday—one that carries her voice, her memories, and the stories that have shaped her.
Published by Finishing Line Press, 2026 Reviewed by Kubra Nazir
Our Homeland, Kashmir, has a peculiarity about silences. Tales and tragedies rarely culminate there; they return in memories, in flashbacks, in whispers. Among those screaming silences, I once heard the story that lies at the heart of Huma Sheikh’s life, the loss of her father, the tragedy that shaped her becoming. While I was reading Qasida for When I Became a Woman, it felt like stepping into a realm where long-kept silences resurrected as an elegy of endurance. The poems, like a phoenix, emerge from the crevices of memory, transforming grief into poetry and memory into resistance.
As a fellow Kashmiri, I understood how she carried that ache all these years— an ache of a homeland that teaches its daughters to speak through absence. She doesn’t mourn alone, rather she crafts word by word what the past tried to blanket. Qasida, a classical Arabic poetic form of praise or elegy, has been turned into an instrument of invocation here, an unburdening where womanhood emerges through memory and silence.
The title of the poetry collection suggests a transformation of what it means to be a woman, and a reclamation against the silencing of women’s voices. It shows what it truly means to inherit both language and silence.
Each line is layered with so much depth and feels like a threshold between the personal and the collective. It reminded me of how writing poetry becomes the very act of witness not only of suffering but of survival. In the poem, “For Kashmiris, war an everyday meal,” she writes,
How to rebuild a sense of refuge when hope beans spill and death blooms for the kin of the slain, memories of dear ones, the endless crackle of a flesh storm?
In Sheikh’s hands, the Qasida becomes an instrument of dialogue between what was taken and what refuses to be silenced. Throughout the poems, she goes back and forth to that memory of her father that changed the entire course of her life. She remembers her father, not as a figure lost to time but as a presence that still inhabits her silences. Her father, a renowned singer of Kashmir, somehow lives in the cadence of her lines as she pays tribute to him and his memories, echoing his songs through the collection like refrains. In the poem, “Qasida for a woman on a train,” she writes,
A Brooklyn subway’s screech like Father’s last Ghazal Kam yaar sapidh khwaab jammed into a cassette recorder. …
Throughout the poetry collection, the past peeks into the present, drifting between temporal planes; moments of childhood arise in her present voice, showing how a woman’s silence is the loudest cry. The inheritance of silence is portrayed as imagery that fuses the domestic with the divine. Sheikh’s silence becomes a prayer; her body becomes a landscape of remembrance. Each line is an instrument of reclamation, showing the way for women to respond. Every word feels earned and every pause deliberate.
As I read through the poems, I could sense a quiet ache in the depths of each line. Her poems are a reminder of how survival sometimes lives quietly in long-kept silences. These poems are more of a collective elegy, a shared act of remembrance, where one woman is speaking on behalf of a those who are still in the journey to find a voice.
In this quiet act of gathering sorrows of many, the solitary transforms into a wound others can feel too. A gathering of voices of those who have endured, remembered, and kept speaking even when the world turned away.
Huma Sheikh is an author, poet, and scholar. Drawing from her Kashmiri roots, her work blends personal narrative with political history. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Journal, Consequence Magazine, Cincinnati Review, and Prism International, among others. A finalist for multiple literary prizes, she holds a PhD in English (Creative Nonfiction) and teaches writing at George Mason University. Her poetry chapbook, Qasida for When I Became a Woman, was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition (Finishing Line Press) and shortlisted for the Own Voices Chapbook Prize by Radix Media.
Kubra Nazir, a seeker of stories, has completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s in English Language and Literature from Kashmir University. Her work across corporate and teaching spaces has enriched the clarity with which she reads and writes. She has taught English Literature at the postgraduate level and contributed to research and editorial projects. In addition, leading a team of creative writers, gave her the fulfilling experience of guiding a diverse group of writers from across the world. Rooted in Kashmir and deeply in love with writing, she dreams of crafting a book someday—one that carries her voice, her memories, and the stories that have shaped her.
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
Lisa Hall Brownell is a writer and editor. Her novel “Gallows Road” was published by Elm Grove Press in 2022 and has been featured in Kirkus Review, the Historical Novel Review,Connecticut Magazine, and elsewhere. She is finishing her second novel Vee’s Bracelet and a collection of short stories, Sidetracks. Lisa earned an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from San Francisco State University and edited SFSU’s literary magazine Transfer. She is a graduate of Brown University where she wrote poetry and plays and worked in the university bookstore.
ROUNDHOUSE CLOCK, by Ronald Scully Yavanika Press, 2025 Review by Lisa Hall Brownell
Whenever my brain is on overload, I crave simplicity – a new pathway of words to follow. That path could be down a river, along a garden path, or through Grand Central Station, as in the poems of Roundhouse Clock.
Ron Scully has found a way to be heard above the chaos and noise of our lives. He builds his short form poems with the lightest, almost airy structures, yet they are strong enough to support the heaviest meditations about time and space. Their simplicity is a ruse, however. They are complex puzzles, weighty but never static; sometimes they split in half or tumble down a page, as in this poem, titled, “Grand Central.”
in the concourse’s opal glass clock
it is a roundhouse
of the mind where space/time arrives/departs
the early/late trains on track where endtime starts
I crossed paths with the poet many years ago when he was a bookseller in New England and also a scholar of philosophy. A few decades later, I discovered his recent poetry and chapbooks published online. I was intrigued by the variety of his chosen subjects, and the many forms his poems take, including haiku, haiga, origami poems, micro-poems, and even an homage to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
it takes the river to keep the rocks quiet time’s sluice
Although Scully distills many complex ideas and loves Latin phrases, his poems are certainly accessible. Many are also free to download online or available for a nominal fee, such as his recent chapbook about chess, master pieces, with witty illustrations that underline that this poet likes to play with words — seriously.
With Roundhouse Clock, Scully appears to be a clockmaker at work, a mechanic of momentum. In the spirit of wordplay, I’d say that Roundhouse Clock strikes the right note. If you’re looking for a reset or a rewind, it just might tick all the boxes.
Ron Scully is a very retired bookseller. After half a lifetime on the road, an authentic Willy Loman only funnier, he relocated from New England and settled in the Pacific Northwest to read and write. He practices haiku daily and has published widely in short form journals. He is the author of over half a dozen chapbooks, most recently needful things (Buttonhook Press, 2024), bureau of weights and measures (Half Day Moon Press, 2024), and the river: a suite of micropoems (Origami Poems Project, 2025). Currently, he is working on the play of his lifetime and researching the possibility of a sports literature anthology. Otherwise, his grandchildren help keep the neurons firing.
Lisa Hall Brownell is a writer and editor. Her novel “Gallows Road” was published by Elm Grove Press in 2022 and has been featured in Kirkus Review, the Historical Novel Review,Connecticut Magazine, and elsewhere. She is finishing her second novel Vee’s Bracelet and a collection of short stories, Sidetracks. Lisa earned an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from San Francisco State University and edited SFSU’s literary magazine Transfer. She is a graduate of Brown University where she wrote poetry and plays and worked in the university bookstore.
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
Ellen Miller-Mack is a poet, nurse practitioner, & blues lover. “Hot Tamale Blues” can be heard Tuesday afternoons at WMUA 91.1 FM (www.wmua.org.) Ellen has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her reviews and poems can be found in Lavender Review, Lily Review, Rattle, Rumpus, MER, Affilia, Valparaiso Poetry Review and others. She co-authored The Real Cost of Prisons (PM Press). She co-hosts “Poet Talk” which is broadcast live from WMUA on Thursday evenings . “Poet Talk” is also a podcast on Spotify. Ellen lives in Western Massachusetts.
That’s the very nature of Saturn, by Michy Woodward
Published by Bottlecap Press Review by Ellen Miller-Mack
Welcome, Michy Woodward, on behalf of women poets from the ‘70s who wrote poems about their lives and sexualities with honesty and clarity. The energy of That’s the very nature of Saturn got me thinking about a poem by Pat Parker (1944-1989) titled “For Willyce” and the poetry of feminist poets Diane Wakoski (b. 1937) and Alta (1942-2024).
The chapbook opens with “We used to be a society,” a litany of well-crafted arrows aimed at Tesla, Ozempic (“America’s least politicized needle”), and targeted direct-to-consumer botox ads, interspersed organically with ideas that are more interior, serving the poem with moments of acute self-awareness and wry humor, stating, for example, that lesbian dating is so fraught with “… the fallacy of the top shortage [it’s] as if I don’t exist.”
There are many deft leaps and delightful surprises in this collection. The poems are trustworthy and left me wanting to know where they were going. In both “monday and then tuesday” and “it’s 2 am on a Wednesday,” I catch a whiff of Joanne Kyger (1934-2017) who wrote wonderfully quotidian poems that may appear at first to be journal entries. Woodward offers a kindred poem beginning with “and I don’t have health insurance/but I feel lucky to be alive “ and ending with,
kissing the morning with laziness the gorgeous possibilities of tomorrow which is already today.
I am enchanted by “your blue subaru,” a tender love poem in which Subaru rhymes with (the singer) Erykah Badu. It’s a small poem, nine short lines, beautifully crafted.
Woodward’s poem “hot girls” appears in the June 2024 issue of Lavender Review. It led me, with great enthusiasm, to this chapbook. In “hot girls,” Woodward laments “ i just keep trusting hot girls who are hot enough to make me trust them.” The hot girls are ravishing and ravaging stand-ins for the perils of love and lust. This poem is expansive, honest and funny, the kind of funny where you know the goddesses are laughing at you so you have to laugh along. It’s a love poem to our susceptible selves. It’s also a young lesbian poem. I wonder if young lesbians would be surprised to know that the longing, lust, love, and desire dip into unrequitedness and even kaleidoscopic sex as they grow older. Lesbian or not, follow Michy Woodward; she is a talented and sure-footed poet.
Curator’s note: Ellen Miller-Mack compares Woodward’s poems with past work of important lesbian and feminist poets. You may not have heard of these poets, and links are included to encourage you to check out their work. –Risa Denenberg
Michy Woodward (she/her) is a queer, mixed-race, Asian American Brooklyn-based writer and artist from Miami. She loves exploring intimacy, sensation, and the relationship between interiority/exteriority through her writing. Her work largely indulges in the softness of everyday life. Her poetry has been published in Bullshit Lit, Queerlings, Lavender Review, Roi Faineant Press, Silly Goose and The Amazine. You can find her on instagram @michywoodward. She loves Sundays, her cat Kimi, and being near bodies of water.
Ellen Miller-Mack is a poet, nurse practitioner, & blues lover. “Hot Tamale Blues” can be heard Tuesday afternoons at WMUA 91.1 FM (www.wmua.org) Ellen has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her reviews and poems can be found in Lavender Review, Lily Review, Rattle, Rumpus, MER, Affilia, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others. She co-authored The Real Cost of Prisons (PM Press). She co-hosts “Poet Talk” which is broadcast live from WMUA on Thursday evenings . “Poet Talk” is also a podcast on Spotify. Ellen lives in Western Massachusetts.
Risa Denenberg is the curator at The Poetry Cafe Online.
Nadja Maril’s chapbook Recipes from My Garden, a compendium of poems and short essays centered around herbs, a kitchen garden, and family memories, was published by Old Scratch Press, in September (2024). Maril’s prose and poetry has been published in literary magazines that include, Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Review and Across the Margin. A former journalist and editor, Nadja has an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. To read more of her work and follow her weekly blog posts, visit Nadjamaril.com. https://nadjamaril.com/
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