Sarah Carson is the author of three poetry collections, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books. Her writing has appeared in The Slowdown, Guernica, Brevity, Prairie Schooner, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently at work on a memoir about motherhood, work, and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com (http://stuffsarahwrote.com/)

 

Dwight “Skip” Stackhouse is a storyteller who has performed live on stage at several venues throughout the greater Detroit area. He is the author of two self-published books, a novel, “Mother’s Milk,” and a book of romantic poetry, “Forever My Heart Desires.” He is planning to release a third book of poems in the fall of 2018 which represents a collection of his work assignments from a class of poets dealing with varied aspects of everyday life—nature, love, death, and happenstance. He also authored a play, an unfinished work that he hopes to produce and bring to the stage within the next two years.

 

Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, artist, curator and teacher. He is author of a volume of poems Plural (Counterpath press). He is co-author of image/text collaboration Seismosis (1913 press), which features his drawings with text by writer/translator John Keene. His poetry, essays, interviews, exhibition and book reviews have been published in several literary journals and arts periodicals including Hambone; American Poet –The Journal of the Academy of American Poets; Pfeil Magazine (Hamburg, DE); Modern Painters; Art in America; and The Brooklyn Rail. Recent publishing credits can be found in The Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses edited by Jordana Moore Saggese (University of California Press); and The Wayland Rudd Collection: Exploring Racial Imaginaries in Soviet Visual Culture edited by Yevgeniy Fiks (Ugly Duckling Presse/D.A.P.). Stackhouse is a Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, at Bard College alum, and a Cave Canem Fellow. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University.

 

Joel Lipman, emeritus Professor of Art & English at the University of Toledo and founding co-director of the Toledo Poets Center, taught poetry, creative writing and the book arts at UT for 37 years. A former student of Gwendolyn Brooks, who was a critical mentor, Joel taught several years at Columbia College (Chicago) before his career in Toledo. In 2008 he was appointed Lucas County’s first Poet Laureate, serving til 2014.

Joel’s books, broadsides and editions are small press publications, limited and obscure. They include Mercury Vapor Lamp [Ocooch Mountain Press], Provocateur [Bloody Twin Press], Machete Chemistry/Panades Physics, co- authored with Yasser Musa [Cubola New Art Foundation], The Real Ideal [Luna Bisante Prods], Ransom Notes [Obscure Publications] and his current book, from The Origins of Poetry [Redfoxpress, 2022]. Active for decades as a mail artist, Joel Lipman’s work appears on-line at the Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry and Poetry Foundation websites. His unique visual poems are distinguished by publication in 2008, 2011 and 2018 in Poetry Magazine.

A Wisconsin native, Joel and Cynthia Lipman live in Lambertville, Michigan.

Patricia Barnes born in Detroit, rejoices in the city's continuing renewal with its lively communities of artists, writers, storytellers, puppeteers and musicians. Pat is a visual artist as well as a poet. She recognizes that just as an artist is constantly on the lookout for some representation of an object that can be a symbol of something richer than itself when it is put in partnership or conflict with another, so a poet manipulates language to juxtapose images in the hope of finding insight into ... well, anything at all. Pat lives in Wyandotte, Michigan where she is an active member of Springfed Arts, The Poetry Society of Michigan, and Downriver Poets and Playwrights. Her newest book is A Cup of Home