Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently So Much More (Harbor Editions, November 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
Jillian A. Fantin is a contemporary court jester with roots in the American South and north central England. They are the vessel for transmission of the full-length, hybrid poetry-play THE DOUGHNUT WORLD (fifth wheel press, 2024) and the author of the prose poetry micro-chapbook A Playdough Symposium (Ghost City Press, 2023). With writer Joy Wilkoff, Jillian co-founded and edits RENESME LITERARY, a shortform Twilight-inspired online arts journal. They also serve as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications’ Best of The Net Anthology and a blog curator for Querencia Press. Connect with Jillian on Twitter (@jilly_stardust) or Instagram (@jillystardust).
Erin Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is the Executive Director of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020) and the founder of the Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American. Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Carlo Matos is a bi+/poly author who has published 13 books of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and scholarship. He is the author of Book of Tongues: The Dead Letters of Pedro & Ines (a collaboration with the poet Amy Sayre Baptista),which is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. His first novel, As Malcriadas or Names We Inherit (New Meridian, 2022) was featured by the literary scholar Vamberto Freitas in the oldest daily paper in Portugal last summer. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in such journals as Hobart, Rhino, PANK, DMQ Review, Modern Drama, and Diagram, among many others. His books have been reviewed in such places as Kirkus Reviews, Boston Review, Iowa Review, and Portuguese-American Journal. Carlo has received grants and fellowships from the Disquiet International Literary Program (Portugal), CantoMundo, the Illinois Arts Council, Fundação Luso-Americana, Instituto Camoes, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the La Romita School of Art (Italy). He is also a winner of the Heartland Poetry Prize in poetry. Carlo is also a founding member of the Portuguese-American writers collective Kale Soup for the Soul and co-edited one of the first anthologies dedicated to Portuguese American and Portuguese Canadian writing. He currently lives in Chicago, is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and is a former MMA fighter and kickboxer. Most days you can find him riding his motorcycles all over the Chicagoland area. Follow him on Instagram @carlomatos8. Check out his blog at carlomatos.blogspot.com.
Heather Leigh (they/them) is a queer, disabled, Chicago-based professor, editor, and writer. They have worked with the editing team of Uncanny Magazine, as a fiction and poetry editor for Curbside Splendor, and as managing editor of LacertaPublications. Their most recent publication, “Netflicks and Chill,” was published in CultureCult’s anthology, Bloodlet. Their writing has been greatly influenced by working with students from marginalized backgrounds throughout Northern Illinois, and currently teach using the theme of analyzing how diverse identities are represented in American culture and entertainment. Their rescue cats strongly approve of her genre-mashup critiques of late-stage capitalism and the harm it is doing to humans living in America and elsewhere.
Sarah A. Chavez, a California mestiza living in the PNW, is the author of the poetry collections like everything else we loved, (Porkbelly Press), Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole (Ravenna Press Triple Series), Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications), and All Day, Talking (dancing girl press). Recent writing projects have received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award, as well as residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Macondo Writers Workshop, and The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her new project, In the Face of Mourning was awarded a 2023 Scholarship & Research grant from the University of Washington Tacoma’s (UWT) School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Chavez teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses and serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology. Recent writing can be found in Diode, Thimble Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Cider Press Review, & The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review.
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They are also a Kelsey Street Press collective member and an Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. www.chinginchen.com
Laura Page lives and works in Eugene OR. She studied English and Writing at Southern Oregon University and is the author of Dove, Coyote, (Ghost Peach Press, 2020). Laura has worked as a literary editor, a poet, and in more recent years, an artist, visually collaborating with writers and small presses in the poetry community.
Jen Gayda Gupta is a poet, educator, and wanderer who spent the last two years traveling across the country in a tiny camper with her spouse and their dog. She recently traded in her nomadic life for a home without wheels in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jen’s work has been published in Up the Staircase, Rattle, Whale Road Review, Ballast, The Shore and others. She is an assistant editor at Best of the Net, and works as a reader for Sundress Publications and The Maine Review. You can find her in the woods or @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.
Robin LaMer Rahija is Midwest poet transplanted to the South. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is currently staff in the Department of English. In 2010, she co-founded and edited Rabbit Catastrophe Press, a handbound, feminist, book arts micropress. In 2015, she co-founded Workhorse Writers Collective, a publishing and education platform for poets outside of academia. Her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere. Inside Out Egg, her first full-length book, came out from Variant Lit in 2024.
Lee Anderson is a trans writer with roots in the American -west and an MFA from Northern Arizona University. Their Pushcart-nominated work can be found in Brevity, Salt Hill Journal, The Rumpus, Gertrude, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Currently, they are the Art & Floating Editor for Best of the Net, Journal Editor for Half Mystic Journal, and a reader for Sundress Publications, and was the inaugural nonfiction writer of the Mountain Words Writer-in-Residence program. You can find them on Instagram @lee.a.writes, at leemarlo.com, or living in Chicago with their partner Emily and a cat named Pretzel.
Sierra Farrare (she/her) is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter. She currently serves as the assistant executive director for the Sundress Academy of the Arts and is a member of the reader boards for Spellbound Publications, LLC. and Sundress Publications. You can find her online at sierrafarrare.com.