Second Sunday Readings

Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of two recent collections of poetry, All Possible Histories (Riot in Your Throat, December 2022) and Helen of Troy is High AF (Harbor Editions, January 2023). She is the author of Letdown (White Pine Press, 2020), American Parable (Autumn House, 2018) and Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market (Codhill Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Southern Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for both neurodiversity and the decentering of cis/het white hegemony.  Megan Freshley is a queer poet living in Portland, OR, and author of the chapbook Hypnic Jerk (The Hunger Press 2021). She is a graduate of Antioch College, the Esalen Institute, and the MFA program at Portland State University. Her poems appear in Portland Review, Witch Craft Magazine, 1001, Old Pal, and others. Jared Harél is the author of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, which won the 2022 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and Go Because I Love You (Diode Editions, 2018.) He’s been awarded the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review, as well as the William Matthews Poetry Prize from Asheville Poetry Review. Harél’s poems have recently appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review and The Sun. He teaches writing, plays drums, and lives in Westchester, NY with his family. 

Linda Michel-Cassidy writes criticism and reviews for venues such as The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Heavy Feather Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, where she is senior reviews editor. For many years, she was a contributing editor at Entropy Magazine. Her writing appears in Rattle, Catamaran, Tahoma Review, No Tokens, Sky Island, and others. She is a metalsmith, installation artist, and teacher. Her story collection When We Were Hardcore, is forthcoming in early 2024. She holds an MFA in visual arts from the California College of the Arts, another in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, a third in poetry from Vermont College, as well as a J.D. from McGeorge, which she rarely uses. Her story collection When We Were Hardcore, is forthcoming in early 2024. She lives on a houseboat in Northern California. More at: lmichelcassidy.com Koss is a queer writer and artist with over 220 publications in journals such as San Pedro River Review, Beaver Mag, Sage Cigarettes, diode poetry, Bending Genres, Five Points, Chiron, Prelude, Anti-Heroin Chic, Petrichor, Cincinnati Review (miCro), Gone Lawn, Outlook Springs, Spillway, and many others. They had work in Best Small Fictions 2020, Bending Genre's Get Bent, and diode's Beyond the Frame. They've received numerous Pushcart and BoTN nominations in poetry, CNF, fiction, and art. Find out more about them at https://koss-works.com. Yael Valencia Aldana is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Black Mestiza from the University Press of Kentucky in 2025, and of the chapbook, Alien(s) from Bottlecap Press. She is the winner of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series Prize 2023 in poetry. She is an Associate Editor at West Trade Review, a Guest Editor at Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, and Craft Literary. She lives in South Florida with her son and too many pets. You can find her online at YaelAldana.com. Her chapbook is available here https://yaelaldana.com/chapbook/

Elizabeth Horner Turner's work has been published in journals including Cutbank, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, Lost Balloon, and trampset. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf's Top 50 and Long List. Her chapbook, The Tales of Flaxie Char, was published through dancing girl press, and her current manuscript has been a finalist in several chapbook competitions. She lives in San Francisco. Joanna Fuhrman, an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is To a New Era. Her seventh book Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press in 2024. She is a graduate of the University of Washington’s MFA program, which awarded her the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Joan Grayson Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Believer, Fence, Lit, and Quarterly West. Her poem “Stagflation” won a 2011 Pushcart Prize, and her poem “Lavender” was featured on The Slowdown podcast. She also creates poetry videos that are on her own Vimeo site and in literary journals including Posit, Triquarterly, Moving Poems Journal, Fence Digital, and Requited. Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound, and the translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, all from Red Hen Press. Her work appears in B O D Y, ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, North American Review, Mid-American Review, and Rattle. She is the former poetry editor of River Styx, the translation editor of Los Angeles Review, and the poet laureate of Marin County. She lives with her family in Novato, CA.

Barb Reynolds is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author of two poetry chapbooks: Boxing Without Gloves and Drawing Words, both on Finishing Line Press; and the irreverent pandemic trilogy Isolation Journal, Volumes 1-3, on Bookbaby.com. Barb spent 22 years as an emergency response child abuse investigator, and she founded the Second Sunday Poetry Series in 2017. For the first three years of the series, poets read together at a pub — and in 2021 Barb handed the series off to Siân to continue on Zoom. Barb’s poetry has been published widely, and her work can be found on her website: barbreynolds.com Janet Jennings’ poetry and flash fiction have appeared in 32 Poems, Baltimore Review, Nimrod, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and Verse Daily, among others. She is the author of the chapbook Traces in Water. For twenty years she owned and ran Sunspire, a natural foods company. Janet lives in San Anselmo, California, with her husband and twin daughters. You can find more of her work here: janetjenningspoet.com/ Siân Killingsworth’s poems have been published in The Rise Up Review, Roi Fainéant Press, Typehouse Literary Journal, Stonecoast Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), & other journals and anthologies including When There Are Nine, a Ruth Bader Ginsburg tribute anthology. She holds an MFA in poetry from The New School and is the host/curator of the Second Sunday Readings series. Find her online at secondsundayreadings.com and on Facebook. Ken Haas lives in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children's Hospital. Ken’s poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies. His first full poetry collection, Borrowed Light, praised by Joe Millar and Ellen Bass, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, won a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Rubery Book Award. Ken has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, and has participated several times in the Community of Writers, on whose Board of Directors he currently serves. Please visit him online at kenhaas.org.

ep. 06 523 PRIDE & JOY Special! ft/Nicole Tallman, griffin epstein, Ben Kline, Andrea Deeken, Lannie Stabile, & Dior Stephens Nicole Tallman is a poet, ghostwriter, and editor. Born and raised in Michigan, she lives in Miami, serves as the Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Special Projects Editor for Redacted Books, Poetry and Reviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review, and a reader for South Florida Poetry Journal and The Los Angeles Review. She is the author of Something Kindred and Poems for the People (the Southern Collective Experience (SCE) Press). Her next book, FERSACE, is forthcoming in November 2023 from ELJ Editions. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @natallman and at nicoletallman.com Andrea Deeken was born in rural Missouri. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Beyond Queer Words, The Blue Mountain Review, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valley Voices and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Mother Kingdom, won the 2021 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition and was a finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards. A former book editor, she has worked in public libraries for fifteen years. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her wife and daughter. Dior J. Stephens is a proud Midwestern Pisces poet. He is the author of SCREAMS & lavender, 001, and CANNON!, all with Ghost City Press. Dior holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy program at the University of Cincinnati. Dior hopes to be a dolphin in his next life. Dior’s preferred pronouns are he/they. He tweets at @dolphinneptune and Instagrams at @dolphinphotos. griffin epstein is a non-binary white settler/occupier from NYC (Lenape land) working in education and community-driven research in Toronto (Dish with One Spoon/Treaty 13). They have been featured in Glad Day's Emerging Writers Series, and their poetry has appeared in CV2, Grain, The Maynard, and Plenitude, among others. griffin is the author of the chapbook so we may be fed (Frog Hollow Press, 2021). They are also a musician and a member of the experimental videogame collective shrunken studios. Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry and a back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie was also named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut poetry full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, was published in 2021 by Cephalopress. Her fiction debut, Something Dead in Everything, is now out with ELJ Editions. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile or @NotALitMag, where she throws random writing contests and open mics. Ben Kline is a poet, storyteller and information professional from the farmlands of Appalachia’s west foothills currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. He writes about the modern digital existence, his former lovers, the Eighties, assorted concepts in astrophysics, rural-urban dichotomies, and queerness as it was, is and might be. His chapbook of origin/astrophysics poems Sagittarius A* was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in October 2020. His chapbook Dead Uncles arrived in May 2021 from Driftwood Press. He is the host of the outdoor reading series POETRY AFIELD at The Littlefield in Cincinnati’s eclectic Northside neighborhood and Poetry Stacked at the University of Cincinnati. He is a cohost of MLVC – The Madonna Podcast. You can peruse Ben’s recent publications at benklineonline.wordpress.com.

Susan Cohen is the author of two chapbooks and the full-length collections Throat Singing (2012), A Different Wakeful Animal (2016), and Democracy of Fire (2022). A former science writer, journalism professor, and contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, she earned an MFA at Pacific University. Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Catamaran, Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review, Verse Daily and many anthologies. Her recent honors include the Red Wheelbarrow Prize judged by Mark Doty and the Terrain.org Poetry Prize judged by Arthur Sze. She lives in Berkeley, California. Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (HarperCollins/ECCO), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong, featured in Oprah Magazine‘s Favorite Things issue, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, Catapult, Ploughshares, and LitHub, and her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Baltimore Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Former poetry co-editor at Women’s Voices for Change and on staff at Bull City Press’s INCH, Amanda is a high school English teacher in San Francisco, where she lives by the beach with her husband and daughter. Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020). Her poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California on the traditional lands of the Tongva/Gabrielino people. See more at www.chloeAVmartinez.com.

Elizabeth M. Castillo is a British-Mauritian poet, writer, and a two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Elizabeth explores the different countries and cultures she grew up with, as well as themes of race & ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, love, loss and grief, and a touch of magical realism. Her writing has been featured in publications and anthologies in the UK, US, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East. Her bilingual, debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras is for sale on Amazon, and her debut chapbook "Not Quite an Ocean" will be published by Nine Pens Press in 2022/2023. You can connect with her on Twitter and IG as @EMCWritesPoetry, or on her website www.elizabethmcastillo.net.    Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, a psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her full-length General Release from the Beginning of the World (January 2023, Free Verse Editions) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022. She gets restless.   Farnaz Fatemi, an Iranian American poet and writer, and Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate for 2023 & 2024, is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective. She was formerly a writing instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, was published in September 2022. It won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith, and received a Starred Review from Publisher’s Weekly.  Some of her poems and lyric essays appear in Poem-a-Day (Poets.org), Tab Journal, Pedestal Review, Nowruz Journal, Grist Journal and Tupelo Quarterly.  More at farnazfatemi.com

Rebecca Evans is a memoirist, poet, and essayist with two MFAs: one in creative nonfiction and the other in poetry from Sierra Nevada University. She teaches creative nonfiction at Boise State University. In addition to writing, she mentors high school girls in the juvenile system and teaches poetry for those in recovery. She also co-hosts the radio program, Writer to Writer.  Rebecca is a disabled and decorated war veteran, a Jew, a gardener, a mother, a worrier, and more. She carries a passion for sharing difficult stories about vulnerability, woven with mysticism. She lives in Idaho with her sons, her Newfies, and her calico cat. Find her at rebeccaevanswriter.com Matthew Thorburn’s most recent book is String, published by Louisiana State University Press. He’s also the author of seven previous collections of poetry, including The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Dear Almost, which received the Lascaux Prize. His work has been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as fellowships from the Bronx and New Jersey arts councils. Originally from Michigan and for many years a New Yorker, he lives with his family near Princeton, New Jersey. His poems, dogs and chickens appear regularly on Instagram (@thorburnpoet).  Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of THEOPHANIES, selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award, and forthcoming with Alice James Books in January 2024. A 2022 Djanikian Scholar, her poems appear in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Sarah is the editor of Palette Poetry and lives in Lewisburg, PA where she is a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.

Allison Thung is a poet and project manager from Singapore. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Chestnut Review, ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Maudlin House, Lumiere Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @poetrybyallison or at www.allisonthung.com. Shei Sanchez is writer, photographer, and teacher from Jersey City, New Jersey. A Best of the Net nominee, Shei’s work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including, most recently One Art Journal, Still: The Journal, One by Jacar Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, The Braided Way, and Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak. When she is not working at a health foundation in West Virginia, she is herding goats, writing in the woods, teaching yoga, and trying to be a good human. Shei lives across the Hocking River with her partner and their family of farm animals in Appalachian Ohio. Guest Host Raegen Pietrucha writes, edits, and consults creatively and professionally. Her chapbook, An Animal I Can't Name, won the 2015 Two of Cups Press competition. Her debut poetry collection, Head of a Gorgon, was published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2022 and she has a memoir in progress. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she was an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. Her work has been published in Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. Connect with her at raegenmp.wordpress.com and on Twitter @freeradicalrp.

Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University and community farm volunteer. You can learn more at www.zoefaystindt.com. Krista Lukas is a writer whose essays, stories, and interviews have been published in The Sun, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the author of a poetry collection, Fans of My Unconscious, poems from which have been selected for The Best American Poetry 2006 and The Writer’s Almanac. Raised in a small-business family—with Old Country ancestors who were farmers, mail carriers, dishwashers, risk-takers, and immigrants—she took detours into circuit board assembly and teaching. Yet she never lost her love, sparked by her favorite teacher in third grade, of reading and writing. Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry and a back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie was also named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut poetry full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, was published in 2021 by Cephalopress. Her fiction debut, Something Dead in Everything, is now out with ELJ Editions. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile or @NotALitMag, where she throws random writing contests and open mics.

Start the week off with poetry!  Join me for the first 2nd Sunday Reading of the year as I host Shiksha Dheda, Julia Guez, and Matthew E. Henry. It's going to be wonderful. Shiksha Dheda is a South African of Indian descent. She uses writing to express her OCD and depression roller-coaster ventures, but mostly to avoid working on her master’s degree. Sometimes, she dabbles in photography, painting, and baking lopsided layered cakes. Her writing has been featured (on/forthcoming) in Wigleaf, Passages North, Brittle Paper, Door is a jar, and Epoch Press amongst others. She is the Pushcart-nominated author of Washed Away (Alien Buddha Press, 2021). She rambles annoyingly at Twitter: @ShikshaWrites. You can find (or ignore her) at https://shikshadheda.wixsite.com/writing Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020. For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America, New York; she’s currently the senior managing director of design and implementation there. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers. You can find more of her work online at www.juliaguez.net and if you are so inclined, can buy all of her books directly from Four Way Books, Bookshop.Org or your local bookstore. Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of the Colored page (Sundress Publications, 2022), Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020) and Dust & Ashes (Californios Press, 2020). He is EIC of The Weight Journal and an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes. MEH’s poetry appears in The Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and Solstice. MEH’s an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com.

It's the last 2nd Sunday reading of the year!! Join in on Sunday, December 11 at 3pm Pacific as griffin epstein, Andrea Deeken, and Nicole Tallman read their work. Please share this invitation with your friends and on social media. The more the merrier! Warmly, Siân Killingsworth, Curator/Host secondsundayreadings.com griffin epstein is a non-binary white settler/occupier from NYC (Lenape land) working in education and community-driven research in Toronto (Dish with One Spoon/Treaty 13). They have been featured in Glad Day's Emerging Writers Series, and their poetry has appeared in CV2, Grain, The Maynard and Plenitude, among others. griffin is the author of the chapbook so we may be fed (Frog Hollow Press, 2021). They are also a musician and a member of the experimental videogame collective shrunken studios. Andrea Deeken was born in rural Missouri. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Beyond Queer Words, The Blue Mountain Review, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valley Voices and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Mother Kingdom, won the 2021 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition and was a finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards. A former book editor, she has worked in public libraries for fifteen years. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her wife and daughter. Nicole Tallman is the Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, and Poetry and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review. She is the author of Something Kindred (The Southern Collective Experience Press), and her next two books, FERSACE and POEMS FOR THE PEOPLE, are forthcoming next year. She is also the editor of STAY GOLDEN, a Golden Girls-inspired special zine published by The Daily Drunk, and co-editor with Maureen Seaton of We Who Rise from Saltwater, Let's Sing!, a collaborative Heroic Sonnet Crown for the Mayor and residents of Miami-Dade County. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.

Elizabeth M. Castillo is a British-Mauritian poet, writer, and a two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Elizabeth explores the different countries and cultures she grew up with, as well as themes of race & ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, love, loss and grief, and a touch of magical realism. Her writing has been featured in publications and anthologies in the UK, US, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East. Her bilingual, debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras is for sale on Amazon, and her debut chapbook "Not Quite an Ocean" will be published by Nine Pens Press in 2022/2023. You can connect with her on Twitter and IG as @EMCWritesPoetry, or on her website www.elizabethmcastillo.net. Jenn Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous poet, novelist, and transformational coach from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. Jenn is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press), and the novels Trinity Sight, Jubilee, and River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Press). Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, and many others. Follow her at jennifergivhan.com. Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) and Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Boulevard, Conduit, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches creative writing for various organizations including Beyond Baroque, Litro Magazine, The Writer’s Center in DC, and elsewhere.

Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths:  The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere.  Yeva is a past Show Us Your Spines Artist-in-Residence (RADAR Productions/SF Public Library), winner of the 2020 Mostly Water Art & Poetry Splash Contest, and poet in QTPOC4SHO, a San Francisco Bay Area artists’ collective.  Yeva’s first chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, will be published by Nomadic Press in 2023. Sera Gamble’s poetry has appeared in publications such as Typehouse, Sky Island Journal, Tinderbox, Nine Mile Magazine, Harpur Palate and Birdcoat Quarterly. She also writes film and television; most recently, she co-created the TV series YOU and THE MAGICIANS. Sera lives in Los Angeles with her husband and dog, who also enjoy poetry.

Shannon Wolf: She is a British writer and teacher living in Denver, Colorado. She received a joint MA-MFA in Poetry at McNeese State University and also has degrees from Lancaster University and the University of Chichester. She is the Co-Curator of the Poets in Pajamas Reading Series. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in Bending Genres, The Forge, No Contact Mag, and HAD, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf. Our next poet is Addie Tsai, a queer, nonbinary artist and writer of color. They teach Creative Writing at the College of William & Mary. Addie teaches in Goddard College's MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University's Mile High MFA Program in Creative Writing. They earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman's University. She is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twinand Unwieldy Creatures, an adult queer biracial Asian retelling of Frankenstein. They are the Fiction Co-Editor and Editor of Features & Reviews at Anomaly, Staff Writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy. Our next poet is Malvika Jolly. She is a writer and translator. Her poetry, essays, and criticism are featured or forthcoming in Chicagomagazine, Frontier Poetry, Liminal Transit Review, The Margins, MIZNA, Poetry Online, Poetry Northwest, South Side Weekly, and Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc. She curates the New Third World, a monthly poetry reading series inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement.

2nd Sunday Readings is inviting you to a very special reading from when there are nine when there are nine is a chapbook of poems in tribute to the life and work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Award-winning poet Patricia Smith penned the forward and contributors of when there are nine include Faylita Hicks, Brian Turner, Chelsea Dingman, and 2nd Sunday curator Siân Killingsworth, among others. With RBG as the focal point, the chapbook underscores the human condition and creates connections across borders and boundaries. When asked how many women on the Supreme Court will be enough, Ruth Bader Ginsburg once replied, "When there are nine." The cultural and feminist icon's indelible impact on innumerable people comes alive in these poems. The poets testify. With grace, dissent, and power, these poets do her justice. This is a necessary and inspiring literary act. It is also a reminder of the work still to be done. --- Lee Herrick Website:  https://whentherearenine.com/ (which has poet bios and order link, etc.) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WHEN-THERE-ARE-NINE-110892148327128

Stephen Thomas Roberts is a poet living in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York, with occasional side trips into Manhattan where he practices law. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Tishman Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Blue Unicorn, Third Wednesday, The Cape Rock, The Driftwood Press, The Worcester Review, The Ocean State Review, and Cagibi, among others. He has been a finalist in the William Wisdom-William Faulkner Writing Competition and for the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. He considers Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, and Sharon Olds to be influences. Our next poet is David Baker. He is author of thirteen books of poetry, recently Whale Fall, published in July by W. W. Norton, and Swift: New and Selected Poems, as well as six books of prose about poetry. Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Mellon Foundation, and Poetry Society of America. Baker’s poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and others.  He served for many years as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review, where he continues to curate the annual eco-poetry issue, “Nature’s Nature.” Baker lives in Granville, Ohio. Our next poet is Rebecca Foust. Her new book, ONLY, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in September 2022. Foust is the author of three chapbooks including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, winner of the 2018 Swan Scythe Chapbook Award and four books including Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53 Award for Poetry. Recognitions include the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar, the CP Cavafy and James Hearst poetry prizes, a 2017-19 Marin Poet Laureateship, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee. Recent poems are in The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, POETRY, and elsewhere. 

Ashley Kunsa is a poet and writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her prose has been published in the Los Angeles Review, Forge Literary Magazine, Sycamore Review, and The Writer Magazine, and her poetry is forthcoming from Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, Radar Poetry, and Cream City Review, among other journals. Currently she is assistant professor of creative writing at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT, where she lives with her husband and two children. Find her online at www.ashleykunsa.com. Mab Jones has read her work all across the UK, in the US, France, Ireland, and Japan. She is the author of three poetry collections and three pamphlets, and the winner of various accolades, including a John Tripp Spoken Poetry award, the Word Factory Neil Gaiman Short Story competition, a Royal Society of Literature award, the Aurora Poetry Prize, the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival Prize, and the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize.  She has presented on BBC Radio 4, written for the New York Times, teaches at Cardiff University, and is resident writer in Cardiff Wetlands. http://www.mabjones.com/ 

Erin Redfern’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Hopkins Review, New Ohio Review, New World Writing, and The Massachusetts Review. She earned her PhD at Northwestern University, where she was a Fellow at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence. Her chapbook is Spellbreaking and Other Life Skills (Blue Lyra Press). She has served as poetry judge for the San Francisco Unified School District’s Arts Festival and a reader for Poetry Center San Jose’s Caesura and DMQ Review. She teaches poetry classes and workshops online. www.erinredfern.net. Nancy Miller Gomez’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2021, The Adroit Journal, New Ohio Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, River Styx, The Rumpus, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Punishment, was published in 2018 as part of the Rattle chapbook series. She co-founded, with Ellen Bass, an organization that provides poetry workshops to incarcerated women and men. She grew up in Kansas and currently lives in Santa Cruz, California. Leonora Simonovis (she/her/ella) is the author of Study of the Raft, winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Kweli Journal, Diode Poetry Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The Rumpus, among others. She has been the recipient of fellowships from Women Who Submit (WWS), VONA, and the Poetry Foundation. A Venezuelan American poet, Leonora lives in San Diego, CA, and teaches Latin American literature and creative writing in Spanish at the University of San Diego. 

George Lober is the author of two books of poetry Shift of Light and A Bridge to There. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and e-zines, including the Monterey Poetry Review, Homestead Review, Eclectic Literary Forum (ELF); Quarry West; The Sandhill Review; Porter Gulch Review, Red Wheelbarrow, The Anthology of Monterey Bay Poetry and The Listening Eye. He is a former winner of the Ruth Cable Memorial Prize for Poetry and currently lives in Monterey, California.  Barbara Quick won the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize for her debut chapbook, The Light on Sifnos (2021: Blue Light Press). A widely published writer, she is best known as author of the 2007 novel Vivaldi’s Virgins, translated into a dozen languages and currently in development as a mini-series. Five of Barbara’s poems were recorded by Garrison Keillor and featured on The Writer’s Almanac last year. She has been the featured guest several times on Grace Cavalieri’s program from the Library of Congress, “The Poet and the Poem.” Barbara’s newest novel is What Disappears (May 17, 2022: Regal House). Raegen Pietrucha writes, edits, and consults creatively and professionally. Her chapbook, An Animal I Can't Name, won the 2015 Two of Cups Press competition; her debut poetry collection, Head of a Gorgon, is forthcoming with Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in May; and she has a memoir in progress. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she was an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. Her work has been published in Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. Connect with her at raegenmp.wordpress.com and on Twitter @freeradicalrp.