Barbara Tate Sayre

Barbara Tate Sayre is an award winning artist and writer.  She began writing in the mid 60's with stories in Modern Romance, True Story, Secrets, etc., all the while creating poetry and articles for many publications.  A member of the British Haiku Society, Haiku Society of America and Tanka Society of America her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies over the years.  Her stories/poetry have been published in Santa Fe Literary Review, Storyteller, The Old Mountain Press Anthology Series, Presence, Blithe Spirit, hedgerow, Contemporary Haibun Online, Modern Haiku, Heron's Nest, seashores, Frogpond, Ribbons, Akitsu Quarterly, among many others.  

She has 3 chapbooks of narrative poetry and two books of haiku/sunryu, tanka and haibun (Darkness in a Noonday Night and Far More Than I Ever Was) in print.  She currently resides in Winchester, TN. 

Lisa Kamolnick

Poet and photographer Lisa Kamolnick explores humanity, nature, and what lies between and beyond. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Moon Magazine, 
HeartWood Literary Magazine, ​SMEOP (HOT), 
Women Speak, Vol. 7, Tennessee Voices, Wild Roof Journal and others. Lisa is Poetry Society of Tennessee’s president and a member of Lost State Writers Guild and Florida State Poets Association. Learn more about her at ​lisakamolnick.com; follow ​@lisakamolnick on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Deborah Zehna-Adams

Deborah-Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry, and served as executive editor of Oconee Spirit Press for ten years. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in One/Jacar Press, Blue Unicorn, The Road Not Taken, Orchards Poetry Journal, Elevation Review, Sheila-na-gig, and ​Roanoke Review, among other places.

​You’re invited to visit her website for information about the author, her work, and and some free reads. www.Deborah-Adams.com

KB Ballentine

KB Ballentine received her MFA in Poetry from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. She currently teaches high school composition, creative writing, and theatre and adjuncts for a local college. She is a board member for SoLit (Chattanooga, TN) and a member of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, the Knoxville Writers’ Guild, and Rhyme-n-Chatt. Ballentine hosts a local Open Mic each month, conducts writing workshops, and is currently a reader for Compass Rose (Washington DC).
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Ballentine is the author of eight collections of poetry, including the 2023 Blue Light Press publication Spirit of Wild and the 2016 Blue Light Press Book Award winner The Perfume of Leaving. Earlier books can be found with Iris Press, Blue Light Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also appears in anthologies including Women Speak: Volume 8 (2022), Appalachia Unmasked (2022), The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft (2021), I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2021), Women Speak: Volume 7 (2021), Pandemic
Evolution (2021), Pandemic Puzzles (2021), In Plein Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets
in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

Abby Lewis

Abby Lewis is a poet from Dandridge, Tennessee. She earned dual master’s degrees from ETSU in 2021, one in English and one in Communication & Storytelling Studies. 
​Reticent, her first full-length poetry collection, was published by Grateful Steps in 2016. Her first chapbook was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Timber, The Mockingbird, Red Mud Review, and Sanctuary, among others. Her very first publication was in ​Gallery, the literary journal of Walters State, and she is eternally grateful. Her book reviews can frequently be found on Chapter 16’s website, as well as in Up the Staircase Quarterly, 
​Black Moon Magazine, and The Keeping Room through Minerva Rising Press. ​

Jeff Price

Jeff Price is about to begin my thirty-second year of teaching English, twenty-three of them at Science Hill in Johnson City. I coached wrestling at the high school, middle school, and college levels for thirty-eight years. I currently reside in Johnson City with my wife Julie and a trio of cats-Merlyn, Mister, and Cleo, and Dewman “Buddy” Doggs, my boon companion.

In April of 2023 his first collection ​of poems, One Steady Glance, was released by Redhawk Publications.
​What he supposes is his greatest hit, "Falcon Dreaming," was published in the 2022 edition of The James Dickey Review.

Matthew Gilbert

Matthew Gilbert is a native Virginian turned Tennessean who enjoys writing that pushes the boundaries between writing and lived experience. His works appears in Delta Poetry Review, Across the Margin, Unstamatic, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol IX: Virginia, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, among others. He is a recipient of the Jesse Stuart Award in Young Adult Fiction and serves as Poetry Editor for ​​Black Moon Magazine. ​

Danita Dodson

Danita Dodson is an educator, literary scholar, and the author of two poetry collections, Trailing
the Azimuth (2021) and The Medicine Woods (2022). She earned degrees in English from Lincoln Memorial University (B.A.) and East Tennessee State University (M.A). She also holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, specializing in 20 th -century literature.

Dodson’s poems, prose, and scholarly articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Salvation
South, Utopian Studies, Critique, Tennessee Voices, Amethyst Review, and elsewhere. She is a
native of Sneedville, Tennessee, where she hikes and explores local history connected to the
wilderness. Though retired from teaching fulltime, she works occasionally as an adjunct English instructor at Walters State Community College. Learn for about her at www.danitadodson.com.

John Crawford

John ​Crawford is a native of Ashdown, AR., having graduated from AHS in 1954.  He holds earned degrees from Texarkana College, A.A., 1956; Ouachita Baptist University, B.A., B.S. E., 1959; Drake University, M.S.E., 1962; Oklahoma State University, Ed.D., 1968.  He is now professor emeritus, Henderson State University, AR.

He has contributed poetry to many journals, state wide, area, regional and national, including College English Association Critic, Christianity Today, Contemporary Poets of Arkansas, Sandcutter, and New England Poetry Journal.

He has read his poetry at scores of state meetings, regional meetings and national conventions including Arkansas Poets Roundtable, Arkansas Writers Conference, Missi-  ssippi Philological Association, Louisiana Philological Association, College English Association, and the National States Poetry Society.

Crawford has won several honor awards, including three Sybil Nash Abrams Awards ( AR ), the Georgia Narrative Poetry Prize, the Arkansas Haiku Society Prize, and the Grand Prize of the International Society.  In 2022 he was added to the HALL OF FAME of the Arkansas Writers Conference.
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He has 5 volumes of poetry published:  Making the Connection, 1989; I Have Become Familiar with the Rain, 1995; French Quarter at Eight, 2007; Female Voices from the Bible, 2017, and Just Off Highway 71: Memories in Lyrics, 2021.

Cynthia Storrs

​Cynthia Storrs is currently teaching and writing in Nashville, TN. A high school and college instructor for nearly 4 decades, she recently moved to TN from Colorado, where she served on the board of Poetry West, the Pikes Peak Poet  Laureate Committee, and with the Pikes Peak Arts Council, which awarded her a grant by for her work in promoting poetry in the Pikes Peak region. Her poetry has won awards and been 
published in print and on-line in CO and TN; she is listed on the Colorado Poets website. In addition to her poetry, she has published articles on bilingualism, biculturalism and cultural adaptation, and addressed conferences in over 10 countries on these topics. She has been selected for two study seminars by the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as one at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and regularly incorporates her love for art in ekphrastic poetry. She appreciates writing, art history, theatre, landscape painting, and chocolate. 
Her poems have been published in 4 volumes of Messages from the Hidden Lake (2010, 2011, 2013, 2014), in 2 volumes of Poetry While You Wait (2012, 2014), in 2 anthologies (America’s Poetic Soul, 2016, and Gathering 2019) and in The Tennessee Magazine (2020), and Critique magazine (2019). At the request of the Emily Dickinson Museum, she presented a workshop on Dickinson and her poetry at the annual conference for the National Council of Teachers of English. 

​After teaching creative writing in high school for 20 years, she now gives writing workshops at The Enrichment Center in Franklin (Williamson Country Parks and Recreation). Her topics include memoire, ekphrastic writing, narrative, and an introduction to writing poetry. She has received awards for her work from the Southern Peaks Public Library, the Pikes Peak Arts Council, the Poetry Society of Tennessee, and Tennessee Magazine.

Keith McCaughin

​Currently Keith is married to the love of his life, Christine. They are both retired and living happily in Morristown, TN. They create and care for many lovely gardens on their small lot as a beautiful wall that Frost would be proud of mending.

He was born in Lisbon, Ohio in 1939. He was reared in and around this tiny and wonderful town to grow up in. After an early career as a French horn player in several symphony orchestras beginning while he was a junior in high school, continued through conservatory training, and into mid-life. He is especially proud of having the honor of Marching and playing the French horn in the National Championship American Legion Band of Salem, Ohio in Dwight David Eisenhower’s second inaugural parade in Washington, DC on January 21, 1957! My highest achievement was flawlessly playing the horn solo in Ravel’s Pavanne with the Hershey Symphony Orchestra many years ago. Much later I wrote:
                                                my nerves ping
                                          hush! ravel’s pavane
                                                my horn sings
I earned a BS in Information Systems, and MS in Systems Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. I worked as an independent consultant specializing in Enterprise Architecture attempting to unite businesses with their information technologies. I co-authored and published half-a-dozen papers on Enterprise Architecture published in various technical journals.

Meanwhile I participated in several poetry groups and published too much late juvenilia in too many poetry journals to mention. Marched and played French Horn in the National Championship American Legion Band of Salem, Ohio in Dwight David Eisenhower’s second inaugural parade in Washington, DC on January 21, 1957
I met and studied Zen under Eido Tai Shimano at his zendo in New York from 1985. I began writing a short form of haiku that is more appropriate for the English language according to Japanese poets. I dedicated the following to him.
                                                  at first light
                                            zendo rock garden
                                                   sleeping ox
Since then, I write solely in this short form of haiku I call a milestone. I recently published two books of milestones available on amazon: Little Poems and More Little Poems 

Patricia Hope

Patricia Hope’s award-winning writing has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Guideposts’ Blessings in Disguise, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Southern Writers, The Writer, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Agape Review, Pigeon Parade Quarterly, The Mildred Haun Review, The Gargoylicon, Liquid Imagination, American Diversity Report, and many newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. She has edited two poetry anthologies. She lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Claudia M. Stanek

​Claudia M. Stanek’s chapbook, Language You Refuse to Learn, was a co-winner of Bright Hill Press’s annual contest (2014). Her poems have been published in Ekstasis, Solum, Book of Matches, Atticus Review, and Rust + Moth, among others. Claudia was awarded a Writer's Residency in Poland, where her work has been translated into Polish. Her poem “Housewife” was selected for a commissioned libretto by Judith Lang Zaimont for the Eastman School of Music’s Women in Music Festival.  She holds an MFA from Bennington College. A founding member of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), Claudia now lives in East Tennessee with her elderly dogs, where she also rescues the occasional hummingbird.

Follow her on Facebook. 

Howard Carman

Howard S. Carman, Jr. grew up in Memphis, TN. He moved to Texas after high school and
received degrees in chemistry from Texas Christian University (B.S.) and Rice University (M.A., Ph.D.). He enjoyed a 30-year career as a research and development chemist and retired in 2018. Trained and widely published in technical writing during his career, he first developed an interest in reading and writing poetry later in life. He self-published his first poetry collection (But Now I See: Rhymes and Reflections) in 2017. Since then, his poetry has won awards from the Poetry Society of Tennessee and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. His poetry appears in multiple volumes of Tennessee Voices Anthology, We Were Not Alone: A Community Building Artworks Anthology, and Black Moon Magazine. He presently serves on the Board of Directors of the Poetry Society of Tennessee as Treasurer and Membership Chair. Howard lives in East Tennessee with his wife, Karen.