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.