Ann and John Brantingham met in London on a joint study abroad program through Mt. San Antonio College and Rio Hondo College and fell just about immediately in love. They were drawn together by a joint passion for art, literature, the forest, the city, dogs, and each other. They’ve tried to live their lives compassionately, and they believe that compassion is their highest purpose and most noble aspiration. They came closer to their own humanity in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks where they volunteered and lived for nine summers in a van. The time they’ve shared with the volunteers, employees, and friends up in the parks means more to them than they can say. What they hope more than anything is that you disappear into your own natural haven and find out a little more about yourself. They keep discovering who they are again and again.
John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has eleven books of poetry and fiction including The L.A. Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press), Crossing the High Sierra (Cholla Needles Press), and California Continuum: Migrations and Amalgamations (Pelekinesis) co-written with Grant Hier. His newest work is Objects of Curiosity, a series of untitled ekphrastic poems about art featured at the Sasse Museum in Upland California. You can view it here: http://sasseartmuseum.org/. He is currently working on another ekphrastic collection with the Sasse Museum about public art in and around the Inland Empire. He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College. He is a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly.
Gail Butensky is a noted photographer whose work you may recognize from the records in your collection (Big Black, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and the band Fuck among others), the books Our Band Could Be Your Life, CBGB & OMFUG: 30 Years and Bob Mould's See a Little Light. Or perhaps you saw her work in The San Francisco Guardian, The Village Voice, or The Chicago Reader, cities she chronicled when she lived in each of those major metropolitan areas. In Every Bend, Butensky's work in each of these venues is on display, as are intimate photos the artist shot outside of the music scene that she has documented for decades. Every Bend is a collection of photographs sequenced by Butensky to resemble a road trip with diary entries for each encampment that is presented here. A fascinating journey and a feast for the eyes.
Allen Callaci is the lead singer for the band Refrigerator, an adjunct professor at Mt Sac Community College, and a librarian at the Upland Public Library where he is the proud co-founder of the largest Star Wars library event on the West Coast. He is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in MungBeing, the Poly Post, The Huffington Post, BK Nation, Cinefantastique, and various 'zines in the 90s. His memoir Heart Like a Starfish was released in 2016 on Pelekinesis. He hails from the Inland Empire region of Southern California.
Dennis Callaci was born in Corona, California and has bounced around Southern California his entire life. He has issued hundreds of recordings over the last three decades on his record label Shrimper, noted for bringing forth the earliest recordings from Amps For Christ, Woods, Franklin Bruno, Wckr Spgt, Lou Barlow's Sentridoh, The Mountain Goats, and a myriad of others. He is in the band Refrigerator, who have released thirteen records over those thirty years as well as a plethora of solo recordings of his own. Callaci's first book, 100 Cassettes was issued by Pelekinesis in 2020 followed by a book of short stories on Bamboo Dart Press in 2021, Five Ghost Stories. He can currently be heard on his radio show with cohort Bill Chen on KSPC weekly.
Nikia Chaney is a textual artist and writer. She is the author of a forthcoming memoir Ladybug (Inlandia Institute, 2022), and us mouth (University of Hell Press, 2018), a full length of poetry. She has served as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). She teaches and lives in California with her children.
Called “one of the innovators of the short short story” by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches has published seven volumes of fiction and nonfiction since 2013. His writing has also appeared in scores of magazines, anthologies, and websites, including Harper’s, Bomb, Semiotext(e), and Fiction International, as well as Billy Collins’ Poetry 180. His new book is Things (Bamboo Dart Press, 2023), a collection of experimental short prose and poetry. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he is also a jazz singer and lyricist.
James Ducat’s poetry has appeared in Carve, Bellingham Review, CutBank, Apogee, Spoon River Poetry Review, has been featured on Verse Daily, and is anthologized by The Inflectionist Review, Orangelandia and others. James holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and is associate professor of English and creative writing at Riverside City College. He is the co-advisory editor of MUSE art and literary journal.
Emily Fernandez is an Associate Professor of English at Pasadena City College and the author of the chapbook Procession of Martyrs (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poems have been published in SHIFT, Antithesis Journal, Black Fork Review, Pangyrus, The Dewdrop, Angel City Review, Tiny Seed Journal and others. She lives in El Sereno, an eastside neighborhood in Los Angeles, with her family, and she spends her Saturday mornings at the beach. She writes, teaches, prays, protests, and tends to her loved ones, animals, and plants. She does none of this with much patience or grace, but she is still learning.
JEFF FRIEDMAN is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, including Ashes in Paradise (Madhat Press, November 2023), The House of Grana Padano (Pelekinesis, April 2022, cowritten with Meg Pokrass), The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), and Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017). Friedman’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, two individual Artist Grants from New Hampshire Arts Council. and numerous other awards and prizes. Friedman is married to the painter Colleen Randall, and they live with their dog Ruby, a mini Aussie, in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. He can often be seen in a large Wallaroo wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses walking 7-10 miles every day with Ruby, whose wondrous barking has become renowned all over New Hampshire and across the border in Vermont.
Victor Gastelum has been showing his visual art since 1992. Most of his art has consisted of stencil multiples sprayed on aluminum, heavy drawing paper, or holographic card stock. After attending a two-year art program at Los Angeles Trade Tech Community College, Gastelum worked at SST Records for nine years, first as a designer and then as art director. His art has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, as well as in the books, Fucked Up + Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement, and Ciudad Hibrida - Hybrid City: The Production of Art in “Alien Territory.” Gastelum has collaborated with his long-time friends in the band, Calexico, creating art for many of their albums. He has also collaborated with these visual artists: Chaz Bojorquez, Raymond Pettibon, and Rolo. Hamilton Press published one of Gastelum’s collaborative lithographs as well as an art-book cover. In addition, Self-Help Graphics has published his serigraphs and monoprints. A native Californian, Gastelum lives in Long Beach, California.
Mark Givens is the owner of Pelekinesis, co-owner of Bamboo Dart Press, and a founding member of the indieground band Wckr Spgt. He is the former publisher of MungBeing Magazine, Salmon Bosch, and The Bowl Sheet. He is a member of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), the Academy of American Poets, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and the Inlandia Institute.
Mark Givens is the owner of Pelekinesis, co-owner of Bamboo Dart Press, and a founding member of the indieground band Wckr Spgt. He is the former publisher of MungBeing Magazine, Salmon Bosch, and The Bowl Sheet. He is a member of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), the Academy of American Poets, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and the Inlandia Institute. Joel Huschle was born in 1965 in Robbinsdale, Minnesota and is the youngest of five children. He is the lyricist and singer in the art damage band, Wckr Spgt. He also operates a solo music enterprise (which happens to employ other musicians), Furniture Huschle. He is retired from forensic and crisis mental health after 30 years in the field. He lives with his wife and two dogs in Pomona, California.
Michelle Gonzalez is a native of southern California and is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, including Morning in the House by the Field and Wild Chrysanthemum. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies such as The GNU Literary Journal, Writing From Inlandia anthologies, and San Bernardino, Singing. Michelle teaches Language Arts in the local school district. She continues to write about her experiences in the Inland Empire where she lives with her family.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya worked as a clinical psychologist for 35 years. She earned her B.A. from Reed College in 1973 and her Ph.D. from the California School of Professional Psychology in 1982. She has managed a congressional campaign, has sung in a local opera company, and has developed cookie recipes for commercial use. She reviewed restaurants for the Claremont Courier for five years, sometimes in heroic couplets, sometimes imitating Hemingway. She shared her life with her late husband for 34 years, which were not enough. She returned to poetry in 2008. Since then, her poems received Special Merit and Honorable Mention in the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial contest from Marge Piercy and from B.F. Fairchild. Other poems have appeared in B O D Y, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Poetry Review, Heron Tree, Waccamaw, Spillway, Measure, and, Rappahannock Poetry Review. She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a monthly poetry series in Claremont, California, and Garden of Verses, an annual day-long reading of nature poems in Claremont’s California Botanic Garden. Kattywompus Press publishes her three chapbooks, Burrowing Song (2013), Eggs Satori (2014), and Kafka’s Cat (2019). Kelsay Books publishes her full-length collection The Book of Knots and their Untying (2016).
Adam Greenfield is the author of two novels, Circa and Mountain Lion Blues (both published by Pelekinesis). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer is a 6-time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction and poetry with work published in The Bellevue Literary Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Pearl, the James Franco Review, Isthmus, Cafe Irreal, and the Gold Man Review. She is the author of the prose poem chapbook SEX WITH BUILDINGS (dancing girl press), the full-length collection HOW FORMAL? (Spout Hill Press), the fabulist novel THE PUPPET TURNERS OF NARROW INTERIOR (Urban Farmhouse Press), the craft of writing magical realism manual, DELICIOUS STRANGENESS (Spout Hill Press), and the novelette RESCUE PLAN (Bamboo Dart Press). Originally from Manhattan, Stephanie lived in Southern California for 30 years. She is managing editor of SHARK REEF Literary Magazine and sits on the advisory board of WRITERS BLOC Los Angeles.
Ellen Harper is a singer, songwriter, musician, and author. Her memoir, published in 2021 on Chronicle Books Always a Song covers a transformational time in American culture. She received a Ph.D. in Education from the Claremont Graduate University, taught at CSU San Bernardino and abandoned a secure career in academia for the sake of folk music. Ellen has released two albums, currently runs the Folk Music Center in Claremont, California and is a member of the folk trio, Citrus Sisters. Harper has been around dogs—farm dogs, city dwellers, townies and suburbanite dogs her whole life. Harper lives in La Verne with two previously unhoused dog companions, Libby and Izzy. Marguerite Millard is a musician and employee at the Folk Music Center in Claremont California, a member of Squeakin’ Wheels a folk/country band, and a member of the folk trio Citrus Sisters. Marguerite has drawn and doodled most of her life—designing, logos, t-shirts, flyers and ad copy. She is thrilled to help bring Ellen’s charming dog characters to life in All That I’m Allowed. Millard lives in Claremont with two previously unhoused dog companions, Perla and M’Lou. She is a keen observer of the canine family.
Tim Hatch is a writer and educator living and working in Southern California’s Inland Empire. He earned his MFA at Cal State San Bernardino, and his poetry has appeared in Cholla Needles, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, East Jasmine Review, The Vehicle, MungBeing, and several other journals across the nation. His eBook series, My Bariatric Year, has two volumes currently for sale (with a third volume coming soon) wherever eBooks are sold. As an adjunct professor, he teaches composition at more colleges than you can shake a stick at, and when he’s not doing that, he spends his time with an emotionally fragile Queensland Heeler, an arthritic Beagle, and his wife, Annette, who puts up with his nonsense way more than he deserves.
Bassist Wendy Atkinson and guitarist David Lester are Horde of Two. Atkinson has released three solo experimental bass albums and her writing has previously appeared in MungBeing. Lester is a graphic novelist and the guitarist in the rock duo Mecca Normal. They live in Vancouver, Canada.
Margot Hover, D.Min. ACPE/NACC Supervisor Emerita spent her pre-retirement career first as high school English and drama teacher, then as teaching chaplain at Dallas Parkland Hospital, Duke University, Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and finally, working with pastors throughout rural Illinois and Missouri. She was foster parent for troubled teens before adopting two Cambodian refugee children, and is now proud grandmother of five. She currently ministers as a Spiritual Director. She lives at Pilgrim Place, a retirement community working for peace, justice, and care of the environment.
Joel Huschle was born in 1965 in Robbinsdale, Minnesota and is the youngest of five children. He is the lyricist and singer in the art damage band, Wckr Spgt. He also operates a solo music enterprise (which happens to employ other musicians), Furniture Huschle. He is retired from forensic and crisis mental health after 30 years in the field. He lives with his wife and two dogs in Pomona, California.
Kendall Johnson grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress consultant—often in the field—specializing in Incident Command System Class I & II commands. As such, he has lectured in fire houses, training camps, hospitals, emergency service institutes, conferences, government training facilities, universities, here and abroad. Serving on the editorial board of the International Journal of Emergency Mental Health, and as Associate Professor at the California State University Long Beach master’s degree program in Emergency Service Administration, he authored a number of professional papers, seven books in the treatment of traumatic stress, school crisis management, and recovery. Recently Dr. Johnson retired from teaching to pursue painting, photography, and writing. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history and his shorter work has appeared in Literary Hub, Chiron Review, Cultural Weekly, Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall. His collection of memoir stories, Chaos & Ash, was released last June from Pelekinesis. He isn’t sure what he wants to be when he grows up.
Michael C. Keith is the author or coauthor of more than two dozen groundbreaking books on electronic media, which have resulted in numerous awards. Beyond that, he is the author of an acclaimed memoir, The Next Better Place from Algonquin Books and over 25 story collections––his latest titles include Quiet Geography from Cervena Barva Press, The Late Epiphany of a Low-Key Oracle from Scantic Books, Bodies in Recline from Pelekinesis, and All the Noise in the Room from MadHat Press. Keith has been nominated for an IPPY, Pushcart Prize, a PEN/Faulkner Award, among others, and was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award for short fiction anthology and a finalist for the International Book Award in the “Fiction Visionary” category. His work has been translated into several languages. He is professor emeritus at Boston College.
King Daddy is a father, grandfather, and bookworm. He dabbles in nudism and Buddhism, revels in primitive acoustic blues and seeks to dwell in the now. He is a life-long resident of the San Gabriel Valley. He sometimes writes poems in black notebooks and has been a member of the performance poetry troupe, Poets in Distress, since the days when pot had seeds. He has won no literary awards or prizes.
Judy Kronenfeld is the author of two previous chapbooks and six books of poetry including If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (2nd ed, Antrim House, 2012). Her poems have appeared in more than four dozen anthologies and in many journals including Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad and Your Daily Poem. A Stanford PhD in English, Judy has also published short stories, creative nonfiction, and criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998)—a rather muckraking book challenging post-structuralist Shakespeare criticism on historical and linguistic grounds. She is a four-time Pushcart nominee and has also been nominated for Best of the Net and serves as an Associate Editor of Poemeleon. Judy taught English Literature at UC Riverside, UC Irvine and Purdue University, and is now Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside, having retired in 2009 after more than two decades teaching there. She has attempted, but is never sure she has succeeded at crossing the boundary between the divided and distinguished worlds of academic criticism and creative writing. A native New Yorker, raised in the Bronx, Judy has lived most of her life in Riverside, California, with her anthropologist husband. Their middle-aged children and four grandchildren live (way too!) far away in Maryland.
Richard Brown Lethem (b. 1932) has been living and thinking in paint on canvas since the 1950s, with results that have been categorized, more or less aptly, as abstraction, expressionism, figuration, social realism, surrealism, and allegory. Now in his 90s, Lethem’s imagery has become unified and direct, often consisting of a central form derived from nature, yet distilled, by the visionary pressure of his attention, into symbols seemingly directly drawn from his psychic landscape, and beamed into that of the viewer. If this is an example of “late style,” it is one defiantly uninterested in a modest contemplation of mortality; instead, the painter’s wisdom exalts an embrace of color and sensuality, and traces the joyous mystery of our consistent presence as neighboring bodies in a shared field of space. He has written poetry since the 1950s to the present.
Michael Loveday is a fiction writer and poet, and has been an editor and tutor of creative writing for more than a decade. His other publications are: the craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022); the hybrid novella-in-flash Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018); and the poetry chapbook He Said / She Said (HappenStance Press, 2011). Michael lives in Bath, England, and mentors novella-in-flash writers through his online programme at www.novella-in-flash.com.
Laura Maher is the author of the chapbook, Sleep Water (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her poetry and prose has appeared in Quarter After Eight, The Common, Crazyhorse, The Collagist, New Ohio Review, and Third Coast. Laura holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona, a Master of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She lives, works, and writes in Tucson, Arizona. LI Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree, California. A mixed-media artist and writer, she is the author of six books including Starshine Road, which won the 2017 Perugia Press Prize, the novella-in-verse, Whole Night Through, and the poetry and art book From the moon, as I fell with artist Zara Kand. Her art, poetry, and prose have appeared in many journals, most recently Adroit, The Indianapolis Review, Waxwing, Diode, Thrush, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Arts & Letters. Her essay, “Drive!” was chosen as the winner of the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 2020. She is married to poet and musician Jonathan Maule of Electric Sound Bath Experience.
Juanita E. Mantz (“JEM”) is a deputy public defender, writer, performer and podcaster, one who believes that stories have the power to change the world. She graduated from UCR in 1999 with a Bachelor's in English Literature and received her J.D. from USC Law in 2002. She is in the low residency MFA creative writing program at The University of New Orleans. Juanita has been with the Law Offices of the Public Defender in Riverside County for over a decade. She specializes in representing incompetent clients under PC Section 1368 and has taken many serious felony cases to trial on the mental health issues. Juanita is an alumni of VONA and The Macondo Writers Workshop and serves on the Board of Directors of the Inlandia Institute. She has been published widely, including in The Acentos Review, Aljazeera, As/Us, Bitch Media, The Dirty Spoon, Entropy, Inlandia, The James Franco Review, MUSE, Riverside Press Enterprise, and the San Bernardino-Singing (anthology), amongst others. She performed in the 2016 cast of Listen to Your Mother, Burbank. She has presented at the UCR Punk Conference, AWP, and Beyond Baroque. She also produced and taught in the ASA 2020 Freedom Course on Combatting Mass Incarceration. On her video "Life of JEM" podcast, she does live interviews with artists, wellness practitioners and writers.
Carol D. Marsh earned her MFA in Nonfiction from Goucher College in 2014. Since then, her writing has won awards from National Indie Book Awards 2017, Sarton Women’s Book Contest 2018, New Millennium Writings 2016, Under the Gum Tree 2018, Solstice Literary Magazine 2020, and Tucson Festival of Books 2021. Her essays have been published in The Vassar Review, Chautauqua Journal, LA Review Best of the Year 2018, and River Teeth, among others. She’s currently working on a researched memoir about being a highly sensitive person (HSP), in which she weaves stories of her life with science, neurology, genetics, and interviews of a diverse cohort of other HSPs.
Ruth Nolan grew up in California’s Mojave Desert and worked as a wildland firefighter for the Bureau of Land Management's California Desert District and also for the U.S. Forest Service, fighting wildfires throughout the western U.S. Her writing is forthcoming in Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California (Angel City Press) and has been notably published in Boom, California; McSweeney’s; East Bay Times; Joshua Tree: Where Two Deserts Meet (Wildsam Guide); Los Angeles Fiction: Southland Writing by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press;) and Desert Oracle. Ruth also writes for News from Native California; Inlandia Literary Journeys; KCET Artbound L.A. and KCET Tending Nature. Ruth is Professor of English and creative writing at College of the Desert. She is curator of the humanities project Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California, and editor of the critically acclaimed anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts (Heyday.) Ruth was named the inaugural Mojave Desert Literary Laureate in 2021.
MEG POKRASS is the award-winning author of 8 flash fiction collections and 2 flash novellas, including Spinning to Mars (Blue Light Book Award, 2021) and The Loss Detector (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in over 900 literary journals has been anthologized in 3 Norton anthologies: Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015), New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2018), and Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton & Co., 2023). She is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction and Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review. Meg lives in Inverness Scotland.
Max Popov is a writer and yoga teacher. He is the author of The Tempest: The Graphic Novel; Weight-Resistance Yoga: Practicing Embodied Spirituality; The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice (published under the name Elliott Goldberg); and two entries in Yoga: L’ encyclopédie: “Yogendra et Kuvalayananda: santé et bien-être pour tous par le yoga” [Yogendra and Kuvalayananda: health and well-being for all through yoga”] and “L’invention de la salutation au Soleil” [“The creation of the sun salutations”] (published under the name Elliott Goldberg). He teaches, in-person and remotely, suspended-body yoga, a regime for performing exercises that systemically strengthen and stretch all the major muscles using a suspension training device (a long inelastic strap anchored to the top of a door) as an at-home yogic movement meditation practice. To read Popov’s reflections on Tell Me About Yourself, learn more about his other published works, and find out about his yogic strength and flexibility training, you can view his web page at maxpopovwriteryogateacher.com.
Cati Porter is the author of nine books and chapbooks, including most recently Slow Unraveling of Living Ghosts, a chapbook co-authored with Johnny Bender and with illustrations by Steve “Lu” Lossing. Her work has appeared in So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, as winner of their annual poetry competition, as well as many others including Rattle, Verse Daily, Salon.com, Contrary, Shark Reef, West Trestle, and Pratik. She lives in Inland Southern California with her family where she directs Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit.
Charles Rammelkamp lives with his wife Abby in Baltimore, Maryland, where he has been retired since 2014. He is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books, Maryland’s oldest continuously-publishing literary publisher, and he writes poetry and fiction. Recent books include A Magician Among the Spirits, winner of the 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize, and Transcendence, published by BlazeVOX Books. Other titles include The Field of Happiness, Ugler Lee, Catastroika, American Zeitgeist, Mata Hari: Eye of the Day, Fusen Bakudan, Me and Sal Paradise, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, Mixed Signals and Castleman in the Academy.
Cindy Rinne is a San Bernardino artist and poet who has created fine art for over 40 years. She was Poet in Residence for the Neutra Institute Gallery and Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art exhibits, and dance performances. Cindy is the author of several books: Today in the Forest with Toti O’Brien (Moonrise Press), silence between drumbeats (Four Feathers Press), Knife Me Split Memories (Cholla Needles Press), Letters Under Rock with Bory Thach, (Elyssar Press), and others. She has participated in several online group exhibitions through LAAA/Gallery825. Cindy had tapestries in “Woven Stories” at MOAH (Lancaster Museum of Art and History) and at RAFFMA at Cal State San Bernardino for “Voices of Ancient Palmyra Resounded.” She participated in “50/50, FIFTY/FIFTY, The Creative Magic of Collaboration” at the Progress Gallery, Pomona, CA. Cindy curated and exhibited at Chaffey Community Museum of Art and the Inland Empire Museum of Art. She exhibited with “Old Broads” curated by Karen Karlsson in several southern California galleries. She has exhibited at the Beatnik Lounge and La Matadora Gallery in Joshua Tree and is represented by Desert Peach Gallery in Yucca Valley, CA.
Willem Maurits Roggeman is a Belgian poet, novelist, and art critic. His poetry has been widely translated, and he is a regular guest at international poetry festivals. He has also published two novels and several collections of articles on artists and highly regarded interviews with writers. In 1988, he was awarded the Order of Leopold II for his cultural work. His most recent book of poems is Bewegend portret (2022). Philippe Ernewein is a native of Turnhout, Belgium. He is the Director of Education at the Denver Academy in Denver, Colorado, USA. Philippe’s published work can be found at www.rememberit.org.
Robert Scotellaro’s work has been included in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Gargoyle, Matter Press, New World Writing, Best Small Fictions 2016, 2017, 2021, Best Microfiction 2020, and elsewhere. He is the author of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry and fiction. His latest flash fiction collection, What Are the Chances? (Press 53) was a finalist for The Big Other Book Award. He has, along with James Thomas, co-edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, published by W.W. Norton & Co. Robert is one of the founding donors to The
Linda and Brian have been friends and collaborators for almost forty years. An album of mid-1980s tracks by their band the Woods, So Long Before Now, is available from Dot Matrix / Modern Harmonic. Linda Smith began making music in Baltimore during the early 1980s with various bands. Following a move to New York City in 1984, she formed the Woods with Brian Bendlin, Peggy Bitzer, and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. After purchasing a four-track cassette machine during that time, Linda began to record her songs at home; from 1987 to 2001 she released music on such labels as Harriet, Feel Good All Over, Slumberland, Shrimper, and her own Preference label. In 2021 Captured Tracks released a vinyl collection of her home recordings titled Till Another Time. Since then she has returned to recording new music, with Untitled 1-10 Plus 1 (Almost Halloween Time Records), and A Passing Cloud, a collaboration with Nancy Andrews (Grapefruit/Gertrude). She received an MFA in visual art from Vermont College of Fine Art in 2008. Brian Bendlin moved to New York City from the Midwest in the 1980s. He was the first drummer for the band Crash, and has been a drummer and percussionist in numerous bands and ensembles, including Robin Crutchfield’s Dark Day, Nothing But Happiness, the Joan Group, and the Balinese gamelans Chandra Kanchana and Giri Mekar. After the breakup of the Woods in 1986, Brian and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer released a series of DIY solo and collaborative cassette albums in the late 1980s under the catchall banner Trouble Picnic, including Brian’s ambient album 13 Groves (1987); they also formed the acoustic trio Two Houses (with Lloyd Miller), which played live in New York, London, and Berlin in 1988. Brian received an MFA in writing from Bard College in 1996.
Thomas R. Thomas lives in Long Beach, CA, and publishes the small press Arroyo Seco Press. Publications include Carnival, Chiron Review, and Silver Birch Press. His books are Scorpio, Five Lines, Climbing Eternity, in which the world is turned upside down, the art of invisibility, Star Chasing, The High Cost of Dying, three on a wire, Lambs to the Slaughter, and Schrödinger's Cat.
Victoria Waddle is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, with fiction and nonfiction published in literary journals and anthologies, including in Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest. A collection of her short fiction, Acts of Contrition, was published by Los Nietos Press. Formerly the managing editor of Inlandia: A Literary Journey, she helped to establish a yearly teen issue. In a previous life, she was a high school English teacher and librarian. The mother of three independent sons, she lives with her husband and two large, rambunctious rescue dogs in Southern California.
Romaine Washington, M. Ed. is the author of "Sirens in Her Belly" (2015, Jamii Publications). She is a fellow of The Watering Hole, South Carolina and the Inland Area Writing Project at the University of California Riverside. She is an active member of the poetry community in the Inland Empire. Washington is an educator and a native Californian from San Bernardino.
Author of work in multiple modes, including fiction, plays, poetry, and translation from the German, Peter Wortsman was a fellow of the Fulbright (1973) and Thomas J. Watson Foundations (1974), and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2010). His work has garnered a Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and an Independent Publishers Book Award, among other honors.
Lyon Street is Marc’s seventh collection of poems. His most recent earlier collections are, The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020), and La Commedia Sotterranea: Swizzle Felt’s First Folio from the Typewriter Underground (Pelekinesis, 2019). He has recorded two spoken word albums: Night Work and Marker and Parker, crafted and contributed to several immersive theatrical productions including Sirens, Dreams, and a Cat (co-written with D. Lowell Wilder, 2020), and written the text for many short films. He lives by the coast in Northern California.
