Melanie Figg's writing awards include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight Foundation, and the Maryland State Arts Council. In her award-winning debut collection, Trace, from New Rivers Press, “Figg kindles broken, dying embers into a roaring memorial for the voiceless.”(Kirkus starred review). Her poems have been published in dozens of journals, including LIT, Colorado Review, and The Iron Horse Literary Review. Melanie teaches writing in the DC area, offers women’s writing retreats, and works remotely with all kinds of writers.
Taryn Frazier lives in southeastern Pennsylvania with her husband and four kids. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like THINK, Light, Snakeskin, and The Colosseum.
Avila Gray is a self-taught illustrator, specialising in fine ink pen and watercolour paintings. Avi is based in Sydney, Australia, where she operates a stationery business called Erlenmeyer, selling art prints, greeting cards, playing cards, stickers and colouring books. Erlenmeyer is also the name of Avi's storytelling animal kingdom; a futuristic utopia where sentient creatures live in harmony across 12 cities on Earth. All of the compositions from her illustrative range depict snapshots from this story; her body of work shows the animal characters that colour the Erlenmeyer world, as well as their culture, values and how they live. Avi has been selling her illustrations and products since 2014 and became a resident at Australia’s iconic Rocks Market for many years, developing a loyal customer base and social media following. After several years of trade shows in Sydney and London, her designs can now be found in more than 80 shops worldwide. Many of Avi's designs are licensed by the international greeting card company, Moonpig./p>
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program. She is a thirteen-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012, she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018, her book In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for The CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry. In 2019, her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. In 2021, Her collection, Alice in Ruby Slippers, was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and awarded an honorable mention in the Poetry category. Her work can be found online and in print and has been featured in Mezzo Cammin, Verse Daily, and many more journals. She is a former editor-in-chief for the Tule Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Women’s Wisdom Art, an organization in Sacramento that supports women’s wellness through creativity in all forms. Her latest collections of poetry, Handful of Stallions at Twilight (Finishing Line Press) and A Shared and Sacred Space (Kelsay Books), are newly released this summer.
Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia. She has published in several online magazines, including Mezzo Cammin; a collection of poems by her on Renaissance subjects is due to appear later this year in Creatively Expanding the Pre-Modern, by Carole Levin, Marguerite A. Tassi, Christine Stewart-Nuñez, and Julia Griffin.
Katie Hartsock's second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press), received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize and was one of Kirkus Review's Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work appears in journals such as Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, and RHINO. She is an associate professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.
Ruth Holzer is the author of nine chapbooks, most recently, Float (Kelsey Books), Home and Away (dancing girl press) and Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, Freshwater, POEM, Southern Poetry Review and other journals and antholgies. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, among her awards are the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia, the Tanka Splendor Award and the Ito En Art of Haiku Contest Grand Prize.
Jenny Isaacs earned a B.A. degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University at a precociously young age. More than 40 years later, her first chapbook, The Argument of Time, is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press as a semi-finalist in their 2025 Open Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared online recently in Pedestal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Bulb Culture Collective.
Jen Karetnick is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award and semi-finalist for the PSV 2025 North American Book Awards. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025) and Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026). The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See
jkaretnick.com.
Miriam N. Kotzin writes fiction and poetry. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Debris Field (David Robert Books 2017). Her second novel, Right This Way was published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in 2023. It joins Country Music (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2017), a novel, The Real Deal (Brick House Press 2012), and a collection of flash fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals such as Shenandoah, Boulevard, Eclectica, Mezzo Cammin, Offcourse, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at Drexel University.
Susan McLean, a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University, has published two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife. A third book is forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her poems have recently appeared in Ecotone, THINK, and New Verse Review.
Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, One Art, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog.
Samantha Pious is a poet, editor, translator, and researcher. She has translated poems from the French of Renée Vivien and from the Portuguese of Judith Teixeira, which are available, respectively, as A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2015, revised 2017) and Cactus Flowers (2025). Her translations from the French of Natalie Clifford Barney are forthcoming; a volume of her original poems, Sappho Is Dead, appeared in 2024. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania.
Leslie Schultz has six collections of poetry; of these, Geranium Lake: Poems on Art and Art-Making (Kelsay Books) is her most recent. Her poetry has appeared widely, in such journals as Poet Lore, Mezzo Cammin, Midwest Quarterly, Able Muse, Naugatuck River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Pensive, MockingHeart Review. and Blue Unicorn. Twice nominated for Pushcart prizes, she serves as a judge for the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. In addition to poems, she publishes photographs, essays, and fiction; makes quilts and soups; and happily mucks about in a garden plagued by shade, rabbits, and walnut trees. (Northfield, Minnesota; www.winonamedia.net).
Janice D. Soderling is a previous contributor to Mezzo Cammin. Over the
years, she has published poetry and fiction in many print and online
journals; most recently in Eclectica and One Art. This year, 2025, sees the release of three titles under the imprint of
Kultivera Production. Our Lives Were Supposed to be Different is a
collection of short stories. Two are poetry collections: The Women
Come and Go, Talking, and Naming the Names
(forthcoming in July/August).
Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist's Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in seventy plus journals and twenty-four anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer's Conference. She is a PhD candidate, English Studies/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.
Recent books by Marly Youmans include: a collection of poems from Phoenicia Publishing, The Book of the Red King; a book-length poem from Wiseblood Books, Seren of the Wildwood; and a novel from Ignatius Press, Charis in the World of Wonders. Photo credit: Michael Miller 7/12/25.
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| Avila Gray is a self-taught illustrator, specialising in fine ink pen and watercolour paintings. Avi is based in Sydney, Australia, where she operates a stationery business called Erlenmeyer, selling art prints, greeting cards, playing cards, stickers and colouring books. Erlenmeyer is also the name of Avi's storytelling animal kingdom; a futuristic utopia where sentient creatures live in harmony across 12 cities on Earth. All of the compositions from her illustrative range depict snapshots from this story; her body of work shows the animal characters that colour the Erlenmeyer world, as well as their culture, values and how they live. Avi has been selling her illustrations and products since 2014 and became a resident at Australia’s iconic Rocks Market for many years, developing a loyal customer base and social media following. After several years of trade shows in Sydney and London, her designs can now be found in more than 80 shops worldwide. Many of Avi's designs are licensed by the international greeting card company, Moonpig.
For additional information, please visit www.erlenmeyer.com.au.
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