Poets

Valerie Nieman is a novelist and poet whose work draws on her life in Appalachia and the South.  Her most recent novel, Blood Clay, was a story of the New South that won the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Prize.
She was longtime a journalist but now is a professor of creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University. She was a founding editor of Kestrel and currently the poetry editor of Prime Number magazine.

From 2013-2014 Val was a North Carolina Arts Council poetry fellow and received an NEA creative writing fellowship as well as major grants in West Virginia and Kentucky.  Her second poetry collection, Hotel Worthy, poems about love, loss, and survival, is being published mid-March 2015 by Press 53 and is also available through Amazon. 

Rhiannon Thorne is the managing editor of cahoodaloodaling and a book reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has appeared, among others, in Existere, Foundling Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Conclave. 

Jonathan Butcher has had poetry appear in various print and online publications. His first chapbook 'Concrete Cradle' was published by Fire Hazard press in 2013, followed the next year by 'Broken Slates'  published by Flutter Press. He has been writing poetry for around nine years, and was for a short period involved as a sub-editor for an internationally distributed poetry zine named 'Unquiet Desperation'. He was born and lives in Sheffield, England.

Harry Calhoun has had work published in hundreds of poetry journals and more than a dozen books and chapbooks over the past three decades. His career has included Pushcart nominations, two Sundress Best of the Net nominations and publications in Abbey, Orange Room Review, Flutter Poetry Journal, Faircloth Review, Thunder Sandwich, Lily and others. Book publications have included I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf and The Black Dog and the Road. In 2011, Flutter Press published his chapbook The Insomnia Poems. 2012 was an exceedingly good year, with the publication of the limited-edition chapbook Maintenance and Death, the chapbook of love poems, How Love Conquers the World, and the collection of poems from the ‘80s and ’90s called Retro, Maintenance and Death has now gone to a second edition. The chapbook Failure is Unimportant came out on Flutter in 2013 and a full-length poetry book, Alarmed in Space and other poems, has been accepted by Unbound Content for release in early 2015. Harry lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife Trina and his dogs Hamlet and Harriet.

Sandy Benitez is the founder and editor of Flutter Press and Poppy Road Review. She's been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Dzanc's Best of the Web, and Best of the Net. Sandy has authored six poetry chapbooks and has appeared in three anthologies. 

She resides in Southern California with her husband and their 2 children.

Tom Pescatore can sometimes be seen wandering along the Walt Whitman bridge or down the sidewalks of Philadelphia's old Skid Row. He might have left a poem or two behind to mark his trail.

His first novel the Boxcar Bop is available now from RunAmok Press.
  
Tom's blogsite, A Magical Mistake

Teacher, compere, performer and poet, Winston Plowes spends his days fine-tuning background noise and rescuing discarded words. These are re-sculpted over a glass of wine into magical poetry birds he releases by night to fly to new homes in journals and online destinations worldwide.
 
He lives in a floating home in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire UK, were he tries to persuade his black cat, ‘Fatty’ that it’s a good idea for her to do the same.
 
Find out more about his work at his website here – www.winstonplowes.co.uk

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Visit 'Random Acts of Poetry' and learn about Winston's commemorative microchap, 'Hebden's Bridges.' His five poems showcase aspects of life in Hebden Bridge, Calderdale in northern UK. Under his guidance and inspired formatting suggestions, this microchap presents his poems paired with sections of a map showing the town's canals and rivers. 

The Origami Poems Project was thrilled and honored to participate in the Hebden Bridge's summer 2017 Arts festival. The palm-sized microchaps were made available at this multi-faceted gathering during the event from 23rd June to 2nd July 2017. hebdenbridgeartsfestival.co.uk/