Issue 91 Contributors
JC Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Journal & Press (2020). Other books include Southbound Express to Bay Head – New Jersey Poems (2015) and Idyll for a Vanishing River (2013). Journal credits include Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Faultline, Hotel Amerika, New York Quarterly, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press.
Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. He has three current books of poems: Invisible Histories, The New Vaudeville, and Midsummer. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, and The Cream City Review.
Justin Groppuso-Cook is a Writer-in-Residence for InsideOut Literary Arts Project and Poetry Reader at West Trade Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Crab Creek Review, EcoTheo Review, Luna Luna Magazine, and Prometheus Dreaming among others. He received the 2021 Haunted Waters Press Award for Poetry and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook, "Our Illuminated Pupils", was a semi-finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Factory Hollow Press). In 2022, he was a resident at Writing Workshops Paris. More information can be found on his website, www.sunnimani.com.
Taiwo Hassan is a writer of Yorùbá descent, a poet and a vocalist. A Best Of The Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Lucent Dreaming, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Wizards In Space and several other places. He emerged the first runner-up for the MANI 10 year anniversary Poetry Competition. He's also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria. His first chapbook, Birds Don't Fly For Pleasure is forthcoming for publication by River Glass Books.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer. Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Fence, Smartish Pace, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.
Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia / mathematics he has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Spillway, The American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs. His fifth collection, When Correlation Is Causation, will be available in early 2022.
Austin Kuntz is a poet local to Pittsburgh and a 2021 graduate from the University of Pittsburgh's undergraduate poetry program. Her writing explores perception of the body, often focused on hair and told through the lens of transition. She has mainly used her own poetry as a means of self exploration with this being the first appearance of her work in a publication.
Danielle McMahon graduated with a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh writing program in 2006. She has been previously published in Spinning Jenny (Issue 9) and Wicked Alice (Fall 2007), under her maiden name.
Helena Mesa is the author of Horse Dance Underwater and an editor for Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and teaches at Albion College.
Jimmy Pappas received an MA in English literature from Rivier University. Published in over 100 journals, he is the Zoom moderator for the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. His poem "Bobby's Story" was one of ten finalists in the 2017 Rattle Poetry Contest and won the 2018 Readers Choice Award. It is included in his first book Scream Wounds, a collection of poems based on veterans' stories. He was the winner of the 2019 Rattle chapbook contest for Falling off the Empire State Building. His YouTube interview with Tim Green is on Rattlecast #34.