Laurette Folk ‘s fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Waxwing, Gravel, Brilliant Flash Fiction,Boston Globe Magazine, and Best Small Fictions. Her first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy won the Independent Press Award for New Adult Fiction. Her second novel, The End of Aphrodite, won the Eric Hoffer Award for General Fiction and is described by Kirkus Reviews as “[A] haunting and poignant reflection on grief, spirituality, and the loving bonds that provide guidance and sustenance.”  Her third novel, Eleison, is now out from Bordighera Press and was listed as a quarter finalist for the Booklife Prize. Laurette is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program.

Carla Panciera’s prose and poetry have appeared in numerous journals including Poetry, the New England Review, Water-Stone Review, and the Los Angeles Review. Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was indexed by Junot Diaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017 Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, was released in the spring of 2023 by Loom Press, Amesbury, MA, and she has also published three collections of poetry: No Day, No Dusk, No Love and One Trail of Longing, Another of String (Bordighera) and One of the Cimalores (Cider Press). Her writing has been supported by funding from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Julia Lisella’s latest collection of poems, Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), was named a finalist in the 2023 Paterson Book Prize and Grand Prize Finalist and Poetry Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her other collections include Always, Terrain, and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, The Common, Nimrod, Pangyrus and many others. She has received writing residencies at MacDowell, Millay and the Vermont Center for the Arts. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Association Literary Reading Series in Boston. For more, see www.julialisellapoetry.com