Author Bios

Andrew Hudson Barter was born and raised on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington state. He earned his degree in writing from Western Washington University, and now lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in The MacGuffin, California Quarterly, The Wineskin, and elsewhere.

Jill Paláez Baumgaertner is Professor of English Emerita and former Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies at Wheaton College, where she also served as Acting Provost in 2018. She received the PhD from Emory University and taught at Valparaiso University. The author of six collections of poetry, including the fothcoming From Shade to Shine: New Poems; she has also edited the forthcoming Taking Root in the Heart: Poems from the Christian Century; and written a textbook on poetry; a book on Flannery O’Connor; and the poetry anthology Imago Dei. She has written lyrics for musical compositions by Michael Gandolfi, Richard Hillert, Carl Schalk, Michael Costello, and Daniel Kellogg.  She received a Fulbright to Spain and has won many awards for her poetry.  She serves as poetry editor of The Christian Century.

Librettist, essayist, translator, and poet, Scott Cairns is Emeritus Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English at University of Missouri, where he directed The Center for Literary Arts and the creative writing program. He now directs the low-residency MFA Program at Seattle Pacific University. His poetry and essays have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He has blogged for the Religion Section of The Huffington Post. His recent books include Anaphora (2019), Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (2015), and Idiot Psalms (2014), and he has this month completed a new manuscript, Lacunae: New Poems. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.

Emily Dexter is an undergraduate student at Indiana Wesleyan University, where she studies English and writing. Her work has appeared in literary journals including The Oakland Arts Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Litbreak Magazine.

Amy Frykholm's poems have been published in Quiddity, Soundings, and The Christian Century. Her most recent book is Wild Woman: A Footnote, the Desert, and My Quest for an Elusive Saint. You can read more of her work here.

Luke Taylor Gilstrap lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and two sons. He has received his MFA from Seattle Pacific University, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spiritus, Ekstasis Magazine, Amethyst Review, and Clearing Paths: A Darkly Bright Anthology of Verse.

Marci Rae Johnson works for Legible.com and is also a freelance editor. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Image, The Christian Century, Main Street Rag, The Collagist, Rhino, Quiddity, Hobart, Redivider, Redactions, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and 32 Poems, among others. Her most recent book, Basic Disaster Supplies Kit, was published by Steel Toe Books.

Spencer Lane Jones is a writer and high school History and Theology teacher. She has studied fiction and creative nonfiction with Aja Gabel, Yahdon Israel, Swan Huntley, and Jamie Quatro. Her essay "On Sex and Grammar'" won Porter House Review's 2021 Creative Nonfiction contest, and she was a 2021 recipient of the Mae Fellowship. She is currently based in Greenville, SC. Follow her on Twitter.

Julie Salmon Kelleher lives halfway between the mountains and the sea in Bellingham, Washington, where she advises capstone projects for the Honors College at Western Washington University. She holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago, and was awarded an NEH Fellowship at the Keough Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. 

Kendall Lyons is a cartoonist, writer, and minister born and raised in Dallas, TX. He earned a Bachelor's in Broadcast Journalism from Oklahoma Christian University and a Master of Arts in Christian Ministry from Dallas Baptist University. He writes and draws a webcomic called "By and By," which focuses on the misadventures of an 11-year-old boy and his constant struggle to understand the world around him. Kendall also uses comics and written work to share his experiences relating to faith, ADHD, Autism, and life. Kendall is married to his wife, Rachel, and they enjoy art, travel, and food together.

Clay Matthews has published poetry in journals such as the American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. His books are Superfecta (Ghost Road Press), RUNOFF (BlazeVox), Pretty, Rooster and Shore (both from Cooper Dillon), and Four-Way Lug Wrench (Main Street Rag Books). He currently lives in Elizabethtown, KY and teaches at Elizabethtown Community & Technical College.

Devon Miller-Duggan has published poems in Rattle, Margie, Christianity and Literature, Gargoyle, Massachusetts Review, and Spillway.  She teaches Poetry Writing at the University of Delaware and anywhere else she can. Her books include Pinning the Bird to the Wall (Tres Chicas Books, 2008), Neither Prayer, Nor Bird (Finishing Line, 2009), Alphabet Year (Wipf & Stock, 2017), and The Slow Salute, winner of the Lithic Press Chapboook Competition, 2018. She is a Delaware native, as long as you don’t count her having been born in a military hospital in Texas. 

Hilesh Patel is a writer, consultant, educator, artist and member of the art group The Chicago ACT Collective. His writing investigates immigration, healing, memory and the idea of living memorials. He was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and has called Chicago home for most of his life. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter.

Alfonso "Sito" Sasieta is a caregiver, poet, & dancer. He works in a L’Arche Greater Washington DC, where adults with & without intellectual disabilities share their lives together. He has recently had poems published or forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, America, Cold Mountain Review, Presence, Vita Poetica, Sojourners, and elsewhere.

Gary D. Schmidt is the acclaimed author of many books for young readers, and professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received both a Newbery Honor and a Printz Honor for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and a Newbery Honor for The Wednesday Wars. He lives with his family on a 150-year-old farm in Alto, Michigan, where he splits wood, plants gardens, writes, and feeds the wild cats that drop by.

Andrew Sorokowski was born in Connecticut to Ukrainian refugee parents and grew up in San Francisco, where he resides. He studied Romance and Slavic languages and history. He has worked in law, publishing, academia, and government as a researcher, writer, editor, and lecturer. Andrew Sorokowski’s translations from contemporary Ukrainian poet Natalia Bilotserkivets’ have appeared in Subprimal Poetry Review (No. 10, 2017) and Peacock Journal (January 2018), and are included in her upcoming collection Subterranean Fire. Two of his poems appeared in Image No. 102 (2019). Another appeared in the inaugural issue of Solum (Vol. I, Fall 2020).

Julie Sumner is a writer who has worked as a critical care nurse, transplant coordinator, and massage therapist. She recently completed her MFA in poetry at Seattle Pacific University. Her work has appeared in Wondrous Real, Fathom Magazine, The Cresset, Juxtaprose, San Pedro River Review, Catalpa Magazine, and The Behemoth. She writes and teaches poetry classes in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Robert Vivian's latest book, co-edited with Joel Peckham, is Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry & Prose.

Diana Woodcock is the author of seven chapbooks and four poetry collections, most recently Facing Aridity (a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature). Forthcoming in 2023 is Holy Sparks (a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award). Recipient of the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, her work appears in Best New Poets 2008 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where her research was an inquiry into the role of poetry in the search for an environmental ethic.

Heather Bartos writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Fatal Flaw, Stoneboat Literary Journal, HerStry, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Dillydoun Review, The Closed Eye Open, Tangled Locks Journal, and in other publications, and also won first place in the Baltimore Review 2022 Micro Lit Contest. Her short stories have appeared in Ponder Review, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. She lives near Portland, Oregon. 

Anthony Butts is the author of Little Low Heaven (New Issues 2003), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2004 William Carlos Williams Award for best book of verse. Butts received his doctorate in poetry writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1999. He is the nephew of former Supremes singing group member Florence Ballard, who committed suicide in 1976. Born and raised in Detroit, Butts now lives in Baton Rouge.

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Image, Prairie Schooner, and Waxwing,  and has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian, and Arabic. Visit her website here.

Kate Chupp is an emerging writer and human rights student from the mountains of Colorado. Her poetry has been published in Ekstasis and Opus, and her journalism can be found in The Anchor. 

Chris Farrar grew up in southern California, earned a doctorate in linguistics, and worked in technology marketing and, eventually, in data analytics. His short pieces have been published at The Jewish Writing Project. His first novel, By the Waters of Babylon, released in 2020, follows a twelve-year-old girl as she’s deported to Babylon after the siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is running a workshop on spiritual writing and working on the manuscript of his second novel.

Adam J. Gellings is the author of the poetry collection Little Palace, and his poems have appeared in New South, The Saint Ann's Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Lily Greenberg is a poet from Nashville, Tennessee living in Portland, Maine. Her work has appeared in Hobart, storySouth, Third Coast Magazine, and Hole in the Head Review, among others, and her debut collection of poems IN THE SHAPE OF A WOMAN is forthcoming with Broadstone Books in 2022. She is a 2021 Breadloaf Scholar and the 2021 recipient of the Dick Shea Memorial Award for Poetry judged by Jennifer Militello. Lily earned her MFA at the University of New Hampshire. Find more of her work here.

Joshua Jones has published poems, essays, and book reviews in journals like Image, Salamander, and Southwest Review. He just completed his Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of North Texas.

Debra Kaufman is the author of the poetry collections God Shattered, Delicate Thefts, The Next Moment, and A Certain Light, as well as three chapbooks, many monologues and short plays, and four full-length plays, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times. She recently adapted Johnny Johnson, Paul Green's 1936 antiwar play, and is working on a new full-length play, Seeing Light. Visit her website here.

Andrew Lansdown is a widely published and award-winning Australian writer whose works include 3 novels, 2 short story collections, 1 essay collection, 2 children’s poetry collections, 2 photography-and-poetry collections and 15 poetry collections. His most recent books are: Kyoto Momiji Tanka: Poems and Photographs of Japan in Autumn (Rhiza Press, Queensland, 2019); and Abundance: New and Selected Poems (Wipf & Stock/ Cascade Books, Oregon, USA, 2020). Abundance was shortlisted for the 2021 Australian Christian Book of the Year Award. His website is here.

Al Maginnes is the author of nine full length collections of poetry and four chapbooks. New poems appear or are forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, Laurel Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review, among others. I live in Raleigh, NC and teach at Louisburg College.

M.B. McLatchey is the recipient of the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal, the Annie Finch Prize from the National Poetry Review, a Pushcart nomination and Best of the Net nomination. She has authored two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the May Swenson Award (Utah State University Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also author of an educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind, (Regal House Publishing, May 2021). M.B. is Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, U.S. Ambassador to the HundrED global education foundation, Poet Laureate of Florida's Volusia County, and Arts & Wellness Ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Visit her here.

Amy Nemecek won the 2021 Paraclete Poetry Prize for her forthcoming book The Language of the Birds (Paraclete Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Presence, St. Katherine Review, Whale Road Review, and The Windhover. Amy lives in West Michigan and edits nonfiction books for a leading publisher. When she isn’t crafting words, she enjoys taking long walks and spending time with her husband and son.

Peter Prizel is a social worker at a nursing home specializing in end-of-life care and a graduate student in the MFA Program at Manhattanville College. His fiction has appeared in The Write Launch and his poetry (as Anthony Chesterfield) in From Whispers to Roars and Meat for Tea. 

Slayd Sasser is a student at Georgia Southern University, where he studies Writing and History. His work has been featured in Calliope and Relief. 

Kerstin Schulz is a German-American writer from Portland, Oregon. In 2019, after a very long hiatus, Kerstin began writing again and in the spring of 2020 she published her first poem. Her work can be found in Ruminate’s Readers' Notes, Critical Read’s Art Is Essential series, Wanderlust: A Travel Journal, The Bookends Review and Cathexis Northwest Press, among other publications.

Sally Thomas is the author of a poetry collection, Motherland (Able Muse Press 2020), and a novel, Works of Mercy, forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in 2022. She is co-editor, with Micah Mattix, of an anthology of contemporary American poetry engaged with Christian faith, forthcoming from Paraclete Press, also in 2022. She is the mother of four young adults, and lives with her husband in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina.

Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and the forthcoming chapbook, Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have received awards from Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Oberon Poetry Magazine and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House and have appeared in journals including Pensive, Heron Tree, Glimpse, Green Ink Poetry, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pedestal, Pangyrus, The Dewdrop, Naugatuck River Review, Sixfold, Solstice, The Cape Rock, Persimmon Tree, and Passengers Journal, among others. Pam is an ordained rabbi, pastoral counselor, and sought-after teacher, who leads spirituality workshops, including poetry writing. Her essays on Judaism, spirituality, and women’s issues have been published broadly. She walks labyrinths in the Bronx, NY and the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.