Emily Hockaday
twitter: @E_Hockaday
Emily Alta Hockaday is a poet and editor living in Queens. Her forthcoming chapbook, Beach Vocabulary, will be out with Red Bird Chapbooks later this year. She is author of three previous chapbooks: Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide, What We Love & Will Not Give Up, and Starting a Life. Her poetry can be found in a number of literary journals including the North American Review, Collapsar, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Newtown Literary. Her poetry is interested in ecology, astronomy, biology, and the petty human condition. When Emily isn’t writing poetry or negotiating with her six-month-old, she is busy as Associate Editor for Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction.
website: emilyhockaday.com
Selected Publications:
- “Origin Story;” “Frog Fears;” “Universe Expanding Faster than Previously Thought”
- “Bisecting a Peach”
- “Bedtime Story”
- “Walking Back from Cherry Grove at Midnight”
- “Moonless Night”
Raquel Vasquez Gilliland
twitter: @poet_raquelvgil
“Like almost all humans, I grew up in a family of story-tellers,” writes Raquel Vasquez Gilliland in her MFA thesis for the University of Alaska Anchorage, Dirt and Honey: Marrying Story and Poetry for the Conscious Earth.
“Unlike most humans,” Vasquez Gilliland continues, “I grew up with magic. My mother cuts distant rain clouds with kitchen knives, my grandmother sweeps away fear with her corn broom, and they both carry rosaries, holy water, and dried beans wherever they go.
“Long removed from Mexico proper, my maternal family kept what I always imagined to be ancient practices alive— masa, clapped into discs and bubbled over the skillet, fried eggs cut with molcajete-smashed peppers and tomatoes, and old family fairy tales, told after the meal’s blessing.”
Influenced by the magic of her upbringing, Vasquez Gilliland’s work focuses on her Mexican-American heritage and identity, as well as preserving ancient folk tales in verse—tales that are both regional and familial. Her first poetry collection, Dirt and Honey, is to be released at AWP 2018 by Green Writers Press. When not writing, Vasquez Gilliland spends her time nurturing her extensive indoor container garden, painting mythic imagery, and preventing her toddler from accomplishing household destruction.
Website: raquelvasquezgilliland.com
IG: raquelvasquezgilliland_poet
Pinterest: raquelvgilliland
Selected Publications:
Kolleen Carney
twitter: @KolleenCarney
Kolleen Carney Hoepfner is a poet, vodka aficionado, and avid Vanderpump Rules- watcher. When she is not procrastinating, she serves as Editor-In-Chief for Drunk Monkeys and Managing Editor for Zoetic Press. She has an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her chapbook, “Your Hand Has Fixed the Firmament”, is available through Grey Books Press. Her work has appeared in Five:2:One, Birth.Movies.Death, Occulum, Moonchild Magazine, among others, and is forthcoming in Glass Poetry. On Sundays, Kolleen eats pasta. Hailing from Massachusetts, she now lives in Burbank, California, with her husband and son. She spends a lot of time on the beach and in the desert, and has a particular love for rabbits, chickens, Twin Peaks, and taking baths. She is currently working on a second poetry collection, slated to be out in the year 2525.
Websites:
Instagram: kolleenbee & kolleen_reads_books
Selected Publications:
- “Everyone is a Predator”
- “In Defense of That Scene in IT”
- “A Correspondence Between Laura and Dale, 1989”
- “Sacrificing Ideas on Pacifism”
Photo by Jessica Lynne Furtado