Meghan Sterling
Meghan Sterling lives in Gardiner, Maine with her family. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rhino Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, Pinch Journal, Radar Poetry, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The West Review, Pirene’s Fountain, the Inflectionist Review, Rise Up Review, the Mom Egg Review and many others. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press. She was Featured Poet in Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 issue, a Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artists’ Colony Resident in 2019 and 2021. She was co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, published by Littoral Books. Her debut full-length poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Eric Offer Grand Prize Award. Her second full-length collection, View from a Borrowed Field, won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize and will come out in March 2023. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will come out in April 2023. Her third full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) will come out summer 2023. When she isn’t writing poetry, being a mom or running in the snow, she works as Program Director for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.
Sampson Spadafore
Sampson Spadafore (they/he) is a white, neurodivergent, queer, gay, nonbinary trans man currently living on unceded Wabanaki tribal land known as Portland, Maine.
Sampson is a trained theatre artist with a BFA in Musical Theatre from Nazareth College of Rochester. There, he studied acting, singing, and dance but explored training in directing, choreography, lighting design, and stage management. He’s thankful to have had such a wide range of experiences because he believes a great director knows and can communicate in all areas of the theatre.
He also identifies as a poet and writer. Sampson is passionate about writing his experiences as a nonbinary trans man. His poetry centers on mental health, sex and sexuality, gender, and Trans and Queer experiences. He was the recipient of the 2022 Bodwell Fellowship through the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Hewnoaks Artist Residency. Since then, he’s been developing a play centering his experience as a nonbinary trans man but explored through the lens of Greek mythology.
As a visible trans person, Sampson is thrilled to explore the world of modeling. He is a recurring model for Guggenheim Fellow Jocelyn Lee. As a dancer and theatre artist, he finds modeling to be a joyous expression of emotion distilled into a single frame.
Lauren Saxon
Lauren Saxon is a queer, Black poet and engineer living in Portland, ME. She loves her cats, her Subaru, and spends way too much time on twitter (@Lsax_235). Lauren is Editor of Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and her work is featured in Flypaper Magazine, Empty Mirror, Homology Lit, Nimrod International Journal and more. Her debut chapbook, “You’re My Favorite” is out now with Thirty West Publishing.
Stefania Irene Marthakis
Stefania Irene Marthakis holds a BA in Poetry & Theatre from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA in Poetry & Poetics from Naropa University. She interned and volunteered at The Poetry Project and attended The European Graduate School. Stefania is the author of Case Memory (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) as well as three chapbooks: The Summer Flood Came Home, The Picture Show (Another New Calligraphy, 2016), and A Filmmaker’s Handbook (dancing girl press, 2017).
Annaliese Jakimides
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and mixed media artist who grew up in inner-city Boston, the first generation of a refugee family; raised three children on 40+ acres on a dirt road in northern Maine; and now lives in an apartment in downtown Bangor. Cited in national competitions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she’s published prose and poetry in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including most recently Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family. Her work has been broadcast on NPR and Maine Public. Her beginnings with artwork were fueled by the only materials she could access when she lived on the land: moss, bark, botanicals. They have found their way into private collections in the U.S. and beyond. All of it feels like an alternate language with which to tell stories, both personal and fictional.
Kathleen Ellis
Kathleen Ellis’ most recent poetry collections are Outer-Body Travel, Narrow River to the North, and Body of Evidence which won the 2022 Grayson Books Poetry Contest. Her poems have recently appeared in The Café Review, Rumors, Secrets, and Lies; A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis; and Enough!: Poems of Resistance and Protest. Poems from “Dear Darwin” were set to music and released as a Parma Recordings CD, nominated for a 2015 Grammy Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Maine Arts Commission, and Nimrod‘s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, she teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Maine, Orono. She also coordinates the annual POETS/SPEAK! in Bangor.
Tzynya Pinchback
Tzynya Pinchback is a disabled mermaid, writing the Black woman body in nature, in illness, and in joy as a deliberate act. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Bettering American Poetry and she was finalist for Plymouth poet laureate. Her chapbook, “How to make pink confetti” was selected for the Dancing Girl Press reading series for women poets. Tzynya’s blog, “A Woman Overboard,” can be found at www.tzynyapinchback.com.
Heather Nelson
Heather Nelsonhas been a student of poetry since 1991, when she studied with CD Wright at Brown University. She has since been published in Ekphrastic Review, Lily Poetry Review, Spoon River Review and others. She currently leads a local weekly free-write group and runs writing workshops for high school students. She enjoys planning community writing events and had led several. Her work can be found here: https://www.
Tom Daley
Tom Daley is a poet and graphic artist who uses calligraphy, drawing, painting, and photography to illustrate poems. He is known in the Boston area for his calligraphic record of excerpts from poetry readings, which he posts online, often with musical accompaniment. His calligraphy has been shown at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the Harris Center for Conservation Education, in Hancock, NH. His work can be found here.
Samaa Abdurraqib
Samaa Abdurraqib has lived in Portland, Maine since 2010 and hasn’t figured out what she’s still doing there – other than adding some much needed melanin to this very white state. After shaking off the shackles of academia, Samaa transitioned into the non-profit world and now has a steady grind of non-profit work, group facilitation, and agitating//activating//organizing. Her academic writing can be found in journals and other publications. Recently, she’s also been doing a lot of writing about her experiences with cancer treatment. In her spare time, Samaa likes to engage in tender-nerdy activities like birding, hiking, board games, and side eye olympics. She wakes up every day being real black, real Muslim, and real queer – she thinks that’s a good thing. When she’s not doing all the things, Samaa sings love songs to her cat, Stashiell Hammett, resident charmer and most adorable feline in the world.
Mihku Paul
Mihku Paul is a Wolastoqey writer and visual artist who grew up on a wild Maine river. Much of her creative work centers on her Indigenous cultural identity and explores the intersections of history, culture and art. Her poetry has been published in multiple anthologies and internationally, and has been translated into French and Spanish. Her writing is used in Maine schools and colleges as a teaching tool. Mihku is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program. She lives and works in Portland.