Poets' Biographical Information

Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina. She has taught at many colleges and published in many places. Currently, she is the director of education at the Hollywood (Florida) campus of City College.

Website: www.kristinberkey-abbott.com

Salma Arastu
Salma Arastu is primarily a visual artist. See her profile in the document titled “Artists’ Biographical Information”.

Laura Boggess
Laura Boggess is the author of Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grown-up World (Leafwood Publishers, 2014). She and her husband are empty-nesting in a little valley in West Virginia. There, she works at a local hospital, where she is considered “essential staff.”

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauraboggess

Lorna Cahall
Lorna Cahall was educated at St. John’s College and the University of Maryland, where she studied ancient history and art history. She was for 15 years a member of the British Open University Humanities faculty at the University of Maryland and has taught many workshops. Her published work includes The Actor King, an adventure set in ancient Alexandria, and several poetry collections, including Late in the Hammock of Night and The Field. Cahall lives in Oregon.

Website: https://lornacahall.blogspot.com

Maureen E. Doallas
Maureen E. Doallas is a writer, editor, and poet. Her poems have been anthologized in A Constellation of Kisses, The Dreamers Anthology, Alice in Wonderland Anthology, Open to Interpretation: Love & Lust, Open to Interpretation: Water’s Edge, and others. Her work also has been published by Broadsided Press, Escape Into Life, Found Poetry Review, Rattle Poets Respond, Poets Responding to the News, and other periodicals and journals. Doallas is the author of the poetry collection Neruda’s Memoirs (T.S. Poetry Press, 2011). She edits the Artist Watch column at Escape Into Life and blogs at Writing Without Paper.

Website: www.escapeintowatch/category/artist-watch

Blog: https://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com

Marjorie Maddox Hafer
Marjorie Maddox Hafer (Marjorie Maddox) is a professor of English and creative writing at Lock Haven University, Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She has published 11 poetry collections, four children’s books, and more than 500 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Forthcoming are Begin with a Question: Poems (2021) and I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (illustrated by Philip Huber, 2020).

Hafer’s other books include Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Wipf & Stock, 2018), about her father’s heart transplant, A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry (December 2019, reprint), Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (December 2019, reprint), and What She Was Saying, a collection of stories (Fomite Press, 2017).

Website: www.marjoriemaddox.com

Marc Harshman
Marc Harshman’s Woman in Red Anorak (Lynx House/University of Washington Press, 2018) won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. His fourteenth children’s book, Fallingwater, co-authored with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. Harshman is co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. His poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and University of Arizona. Appointed in 2012, Harshman is the seventh Poet Laureate of West Virginia. He holds degrees from Bethany College, Yale Divinity School, and University of Pittsburgh.

Website: https://marcharshman.com

Laurie Klein
Laurie Klein writes poetry, prose, songs, and a weekly blog. She is the author of the poetry collection Where the Sky Opens, a Partial Cosmography (Cascade Books, 2015), which is described as two journeys into solitude and wilderness. Her work has been published widely in literary journals, anthologies, online zines, a chapbook, hymnals, and recordings, most recently for T.S. Poetry’s Tweetspeak Poetry. Klein is

an accomplished audiobook narrator (Books-in-Motion) and a co-founder of Rock & Sling, a journal of witness. In addition, Klein is the recipient of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Information about Klein’s artwork is included in her profile in the document titled “Artists’ Biographical Information.”

Website: https://lauriekleinscribe.com/

Yahia Lababidi
Yahia Lababidi is the author, most recently, of Revolutions of the Heart (Wipf & Stock, 2020), a new collection of essays, poems, and conversations. His several books of aphorisms include Signposts to Elsewhere (Hay House, 2019). In addition to writing creative nonfiction, Lababidi is a poet who publishes widely in literary journals and anthologies and has been a nominee at least three times for a Pushcart Prize. Lababidi’s work has been translated into Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, and a number of other languages.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YahiaLababidi2

Robert McDowell
Robert McDowell is a poet, author, educator, activist for women’s advancement and rights, public speaker, performer, storyteller, and mentor. He has written more than a dozen books, including the forthcoming Sweet Wolf: New & Selected Poems (Spring 2021) and The World Next to This One: Poems (Salmon Press, 2014). The co-author of two volumes of literary theory, McDowell also is co-translator of a collection of stories by Ota Pavel and editor of three anthologies. He is the founder of the new Homestead Lighthouse Press and founding publisher and editor of Story Line Press. McDowell, who has taught at the college and university level, conducts writers’ conferences and workshops, and leads retreats and workshops in the United States

and abroad (Ireland). The co-creator of The Poets’ Prize and the Rural Readers Project, McDowell has been awarded several fellowships and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Website: www.robertmcdowell.net

Drew Myron
Drew Myron is a writer and editor who lives in Oregon. “Art is solace in these dark days, and writing is providing me great comfort,” she says.

Website: https://drewmyron.com

Michelle Ortega
Michelle Ortega is a licensed speech-language pathologist in private practice. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming, online and in print, at Tweetspeak Poetry, Casual (an e-book), Tiferet Journal, Exit 13, Shrew LitMag, Contemporary Haibun Online, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, The Platform Review, and, abroad, in Horizon: The Haiku Anthology. Her microchapbook, Tissue Memory, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press.

Website: https://www.instagram.com/michellebelleslp/

Christine Valters Paintner
Christine Valters Paintner is an American poet and writer who lives in Galway, Ireland. The author of 12 books of nonfiction on the creative process and contemplative practice, including Earth, Our Original Monastery (Ave Maria Press, April 2020), Paintner has published poems in both the United States and Ireland in such publications as The Galway Review, Boyne Berries, Spiritus Journal, ARTS, Presence: Journal of Spiritual Directors International, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Tiferet, The Blue Nib, and Tales from the Forest. Her first poetry collection, Dreaming of Stones (Paraclete Press) was published in 2019. Forthcoming is The Wisdom of Wild Grace (Paraclete Press, October 2020), 30 poems inspired by stories of kinship between saints and animals.

Paintner holds a doctorate in Christian spirituality from Graduate Theological Union, a master’s degree in systematic theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Fordham University. She is also a registered expressive arts consultant and educator and is certified in the art of spiritual direction supervision.

Website: https://abbeyofthearts.com/

Sheika A.
Sheika A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her work appears in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Recent publications are Strange Horizons, Pedestal Magazine, Alban Lake Publishing, and The Ekphrastic Review. Sheika A.’s poetry has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Albanian, Italian, Arabic, and Persian.

Sheikha A. also is the co-author of a digital poetry chapbook, Nyctophiliac Confessions, available from Praxis Magazine. Additional information about her published work can be found at her blog.

Website: https://sheikha82.wordpress.com

Martha Silano
Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist (2019), Reckless Lovely (2014), and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (2011), all from Saturnalia Books. She has published her poems in Poetry, New England Review, American Poetry Review, and Paris Review, among many other well-known and prestigious periodicals, and in at least four dozen print anthologies. Silano is the co-author, with poet Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. She is the recipient of Yaddo’s 2017 Martha Walsh Pulver Residency. She teaches at Bellevue College, Bellevue, Wash.

Website: https://marthasilano.net/index.html

Judith Sornberger
Judith Sornberger is a poet, memoirist, and essayist. Her poetry books are Practicing the World (CavanKerry, 2018), I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock, 2019), and Open Heart (Calyx Books). She is also the author of five chapbooks and the prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany (Shanti Arts Press, 2015). Sornberger is professor emerita of Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, where she founded the Women’s Studies Program and taught English literature and writing. She lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, Pa., among bobcats, bears, and deer.

Website: www.judithsornberger.net

Diane Walker
Diane Walker is an artist, poet, photographer, and actor. She pairs her writing and spiritual practice with her art to produce a daily blog of meditations, poetry, photographs, and paintings.

Website: www.contemplativephotography.com

Shanna Powlus Wheeler
Shanna Powlus Wheeler is the author of two collections of poetry: Evensong for Shadows (Resource Publications) and Lo & Behold (Finishing Line Press). Wheeler teaches writing at Lycoming College, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Website: www.shannapowluswheeler.com