WRITERS
Michael Cartright
Hails from the Ozark Highlands of Southwest Missouri. He has devoted forty plus years to the study of poetry and music. He once described his poems as frames of film, momentary photographs. The odd rhythms and beats in the poems are driven by his interest in jazz music. American language, as it is spoken by the natives, is a feature of his poems with a focus on the accuracy of the frames clicking by.
Dave Ashmore / dasho
Bides his time as a multi-dimensional multi-media artist & poet living in southwestern Missouri. He has an obsessive habit of sync-cruising endless backroads with his buddy Steve, dreams in 24 frames per second & hears a full cast of strange voices in perfect harmony.
He thinks it's all for the birds.
John Courtney
Born, raised and writes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has driven tractor trailers across the United States for 15 years covering nearly two million miles. He has seen a lot of things and one day hopes to see every thing. That is what he writes about.
His cat is named Jeffers.
Jason Brown
A husband and father of two, he continues to fight off the cynicism of a police career through his love of music and poetry in his long-time home of Albuquerque, New Mexico. With family roots in Southwest Missouri, running westward to his place of birth in Oklahoma, origins and eternity are a central theme in his poems. He thrives off the rhythm and duality the American language provides.
John Macker
John grew up in Colorado and studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He has published 10 full-length books of poetry, 2 audio recordings and several broadsides and chapbooks over 30 years. His most recent are Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Books Awards finalist), Gorge Songs (with Denver woodblock artist Leon Loughridge), Blood in the Mix (with El Paso poet Lawrence Welsh) and part three of his “Badlands” trilogy, Disassembled Badlands published by Colorado's Turkey Buzzard Press, 2014. His books were featured in the Colorado State Historical Society exhibit, Mile High Underground, featuring 30 years of Denver art and poetics. In the mid 1990's he edited the award-winning HARP Arts Journal in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. He has received 2 Pushcart Prize nominations and 2006 won Mad Blood magazine's first annual literary prize. That same year he edited the Desert Shovel Review. He has received the James Ryan Morris Memorial (Tombstone) Award for poetry and a Colorado Council on the Arts grant. In 2019, won a Fischer Poetry Prize finalist award, sponsored by the Telluride Institute. His recent prose and essays on poets and poetics have appeared in Albuquerque's Malpais Review (where he was contributing editor), Cultural Weekly, as it ought to be magazine, Miriam's Well, Mad Swirl, Manzano Mountain Review and Lummox Journal. For the last 24 years, he has lived in New Mexico.
Winner of the 2021
New Mexico-Arizona
Book Award
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Fiction Anthology
Desert Threnody
John Macker
Auxarczen Press
Donnie Michael
As mysteriously as he blew into our lives, his words blow us back to a time in the late 1980s driving a cab through victorian streets in the shadow of Aspen Mountain. He now calls the Texas Hill Country home.
Matt McGowan
Grew up in southwest Missouri and attended the University of Missouri. He was a newspaper reporter, and for many years he has worked as a science and research writer at the University of Arkansas.
His short stories have appeared in Adirondack Review, Deep South Magazine, Concho River Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Arkansas Review and others.
Matt lives with his wife and children in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Wayne Zade
Wayne was born in 1947 in Chicago and raised there. He attended the University of Notre Dame as an English major and earned a Master’s in English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From there he moved on to the Iowa Writers; Workshop, where he finished an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, 1973.
He was lucky enough to get a teaching job as an instructor of Composition at the Univesity of Missouri, Columbia, 1974-76. Then, after a part-time position, he obtained a tenure-track position at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, where he taught a variety of courses until retiring in 2016.
Among the courses Wayne taught at Westminster were Jazz, Blues, and Poetry; The Harlem Renaissance; Langton Hughes; Jazz, Country & Western, and Poetry; Trailer Park Fiction; The Photograph as a Literary Text; Haruki Murakami; and Jazz and Japan. He might say that his favorite course to teach was the American Lit survey course.
Zade published poems in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Shenandoah, The North American Review, The Cortland Review, and others. He published jazz interviews and record reviews in All About Jazz and Belles Lettres. He published his first book of poems, Aurora, in 2018. Nippon Soul: Jazz in Japan, Interviews 200-2012, appeared in 2023.
Edwin Forrest Ward
Ed has been active in the world of Poetry and Small Press since 1977. Larry Lake of the Bowery Press pub
Ed has been active in the world of Poetry and Small Press since 1977. Larry Lake of the Bowery Press published Ed's first book, citysight, a collection of poems with drawings by Michael Bergt in 1981. Since then Ed has published six books: ladywho (1981 poetry); soloists (1984 poetry); MOVIEOS (1989 fiction); Lucy & Eddie (1999 novel); TIME IS A PLACE (2001 Fiction & Poetry); and MONOLOGUES (2004 Dramatic Monologues). Additionally, Ed has published over 50 STORIES FOR THE STAGE, all of which can be found on Ed's blog http://edwinforrestward.blogspot.com/
Ed has received the following literary awards: The James Ryan Morris Memorial Foundation's Colorado Art Award, the Tombstone for Poetry in 1979; Westword's 1998 Denver's Best Poetry Reading Award; and The Society for the Advancement of Poetic's LuLu Award in 2000 for service to the literary community.
Ed has also worked on numerous small press publications. He was the editor of both Passion Press magazine (1981-1988) and POINT magazine (1991-1992).
