Issue One Bios
October 2021
Ellery Akers’s latest collection of poems is Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, which won BookAuthority’s Award for Best Environmentalism Books of All Time. She is also the author of three other award-winning books: Practicing the Truth, Knocking on the Earth, and Sarah’s Waterfall. She lives in Nothern California and teaches private poetry workshops.
Sarah Audsley's work, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2020, appears in New England Review, The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Pleiades. Her manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. She is a member of The Starlings Collective, a collective of diverse voices of ALAANA adoptee writers and artists.
Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. She was the recipient of the Witter Bynner Funded Native Poet Residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, CO and is a mentor for the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA in Creative Writing.
Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco. He writes for SFGATE, KQED, Datebook, 48Hills, and other publications, and is on Twitter and IG being a useless pocho millennial @alan_chazaro.
Aja Couchois Duncan is a social justice coach and capacity builder of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent who lives on the ancestral and stolen land of the Coastal Miwok people. Her debut collection Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and awarded the California Book Award for Poetry in 2017. Her second book Vestigial (Litmus Press) was published this August.
Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator and multi-genre writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, and United States Artists Foundations. His new book Twice Alive focuses on human and ecological intimacies.
Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. In 2016, Hillman was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Sally Keith's most recent collection is River House (Milkweed 2015). She lives in Fairfax, VA and teaches at George Mason University.
Kym Martindale until recently taught English and Creative Writing at Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK. She returned to her native Yorkshire two years ago and has been busy rediscovering reservoirs through Hydrospheres, a tremendously moving and exciting journey. Much like rediscovering poetry.
Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron, 2016), Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015). He is the recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize.
Cindy Milwe is a writer and teacher who lives with her family in Venice, CA. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Salvage will be published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2022.
Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist and poet working with the mediums of language, image, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. She can be found wandering public wildlands, in Portland, Oregon, or at www.danielamolnar.com / IG: @daniela_naomi_molnar
Lisa Olstein's most recent books include the poetry collection Late Empire (Copper Canyon Press) and the lyric essay Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press). Climate, a collection of epistolary essays co-written with Julie Carr, is forthcoming from Essay Press in '22, and Dream Apartment, a new book of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in '23. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and Hayden Carruth Award, Olstein teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Texas at Austin.
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), which was an NAACP Image Award Nominee, and Spit Back a Boy, winner of the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
Noah Ross is the author of Active Reception (Nightboat Books, 2021) and Swell (Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2019). He lives in Berkeley, CA, where he is a bookseller and editor at Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects and, with Lindsay Choi, at Mo0on/IO.
Jack Shear is a photographer and art collector who lives and works in New York City and Spencertown, NY. His work emphasizes portraiture and nudes and is represented in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Exhibitions include solo shows at Yale University School of Art and Le Musée Territorial de St Barthelme and he has published two books, Four Marines and Other Portraits and Short Season.
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series. He is the recipient of a 92Y Discovery Prize, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at Diné College.
Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic. Her books include Cut Flowers (Guillemot 2021), Gathering Grounds (Shearsman, 2019) and Field (Shearsman, 2016), as well as four artists books with Judith Tucker (Wild Pansy Press). She is Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics at Sheffield Hallam University.
Patricia Zylius is the author of the chapbook Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in California Quarterly, SWWIM, Plant-Human Quarterly, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crosswinds, Body, Sequestrum, Book of Matches, and other journals, and on the Women’s Voices for Change website. Her poems are also included in Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, In Plein Air, and other anthologies.