After forty years in the business and academic worlds, Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in
Clackamas, OR, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. Since the only poem she
wrote in high school was red-penciled “extremely maudlin,” she is still amazed she continues to
write. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications including Persimmon Tree, Stirring,
Naugatuck River Review, and Antiphon. Her second collection, The Way a Woman Knows, was
released in February 2015 by The Poetry Box, Portland, Oregon
(www.thewayawomanknows.com ).
Tracy Mishkin is a call center veteran with a PhD and an MFA student in Creative Writing at
Butler University. Her chapbook, I Almost Didn't Make It to McDonald's, was published by
Finishing Line Press in 2014. Her work has appeared recently in Hartskill Review and The
Quotable.
Tom Montag is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013. He is a
contributing writer at Verse-Virtual and in 2015 was the featured poet at Atticus Review (April) and
Contemporary American Voices (August). Other poems are found at Hamilton Stone Review, The
Homestead Review, Little Patuxent Review, Mud Season Review, Poetry Quarterly, Provo Canyon
Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere.
Daryl Muranaka was raised in California and Hawaii. He received his MFA from Eastern
Washington University and spent three years in Fukui, Japan, in the JET Program. He lives in
Boston with his family. In his spare time, he enjoys aikido and taijiquan and exploring his
children’s dual heritages. His first book, Hanami, was published in 2015 by Aldrich Press and his
first chapbook, The Minstrel of Belmont, by Finishing Line Press.
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words in fire to wake the world ablaze: free verse illuminated by
courage that empathizes with all the awful moments, launching a freight train warning that blazes
from the heart, like a chambered bullet exploding inadvertently. His poetry collection, freedomland
blues (Transcendent Zero Press, 2014), was released in September of 2014. He also has an echapbook, entitled physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014), which was released
in December of 2014. Additionally, he has self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of
Resistance, and is currently working on a book of connected short stories. He is a Pushcart Prize
nominee.
Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published five books and 72 articles, edited
22 books/proceedings and three national journals, and publishes a newspaper column. In creative
writing, she has 10 poetry chapbooks and four full-length collections, over 100 short stories, four
novels, a novella, two short story collections (another in press), and 41 plays. As North Carolina’s
Central Region Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet 2013-2015, she mentored student and adult
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