About the Poets:

AMIE WHITTEMORE is the author of Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-Tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books, 2023), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and was named a 2020 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow.

Through her laureateship she partnered with Southern Word to offer Write with Pride, a series of poetry workshops and open mics for LGBT+ teens in Rutherford and Davidson counties.

She is Director of MTSU Write, a from-home, one-on-one creative writing certificate program as well as a lecturer in the English Department at Middle Tennessee State University. She holds degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (B.A.), Lewis & Clark College (M.A.T.), and Southern Illinois University Carbondale (M.F.A.). She is also Reviews Editor at Southern Indiana Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Cold Mountain Review, Pleiades, The Account, and elsewhere.

ALLISON BLEVINS is the author of Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019).  Her book Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2023) and her collaborative chapbook Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021) are both forthcoming.  She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Editor at the museum of americana.  She lives in Missouri with her spouse and three children.

MELISSA CUNDIEFF is a poet and visual artist who teaches at both Macalester and University of Minnesota. She received her MFA in creative writing from Vanderbilt University and is the author of the poetry collection Darling Nova, which was selected by Alberto Ríos for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared twice in The Atlantic, as well as places like Best of the Net, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal. Originally from Texas, she lives in Saint Paul.