Sandy Coomer is a poet, artist, and endurance athlete living in Brentwood, TN. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Rivers Within Us (Unsolicited Press). Over 130 of her paintings have been published in literary art magazines, as well as being featured in local exhibits and art shows. Sandy is the founding editor of the online poetry journal Rockvale Review, the curator of the ekphrastic poetry project 20/20 Vision, a Poetic Response to Photography, and the founder and director of Rockvale Writers’ Colony, located in College Grove, TN. She is a teacher, a dreamer, an explorer, and an Ironman triathlete. Her favorite word is “Believe.”
Wesley D. Sims has published four chapbooks of poetry: When Night Comes, Taste of Change, A Pocketful of Little Poems, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Maturity. His work has appeared in Artemis Journal, Bewildering Stories, Breath & Shadow, Connecticut Review, G.W. Review, Liquid Imagination, Novelty Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Plum Tree Tavern, Poem, Poetry Quarterly, Proverse, Quill & Parchment, Songs of Eretz, The American Diversity Report, The South Carolina Review, Time of Singing, Word Gathering, and several other journals and anthologies. He has had poems nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.
Dan Veach is the founder and for two decades the editor of Atlanta Review. His collection of poems and Chinese ink paintings, Elephant Water, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award. Dan’s translations from Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon have won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Independent Publisher Book Award. He is the editor and co-translator of Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq (Michigan State University Press, 2008). A recipient of the Georgia Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, Dan has performed his poetry worldwide, including Oxford University, People’s University in Beijing, the American University in Cairo, the Atheneum in Madrid, and the Adelaide Festival in Australia. He also plays bass clarinet and composes for concert band and orchestra.
Daniel Corrie’s first full-length book of poems is near completion. Chapbooks of his poetry include Human and For the Future (Iris Press) and Words, World (Blue Horse Press). His poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Birmingham Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Hudson Review, Image, Kenyon Review, Measure, Missouri Review, The Nation, New Criterion, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Terrain.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, with poems selected for five anthologies and for Verse Daily. One of his poems received the first-place 2011 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. He and his wife live on their farm in rural Georgia.
Susan O’Dell Underwood directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee. Besides two chapbooks (From and Love and Other Hungers) her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, North Carolina Literary Review, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a PhD in English from Florida State University. The first chapter of her novel Genesis Road won the Tennessee Arts Commission Grant for Literature. She and her husband, artist David Underwood, run Sapling Grove Press, devoted to underserved writers, artists, and photographers in Appalachia. For more information visit: susanodellunderwood.com and saplinggrovepress.com.
Lana K. W. Austin’s poems and short stories have recently been featured in Mid-American Review, Sou’wester, The Chariton Review, Columbia Journal, Zone 3, Appalachian Heritage, The Pinch, The New Guard, Switchback, Bloodroot, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Southern Women’s Review, and others. Born and raised in rural Kentucky, Austin studied creative writing at both Hollins University and the University of Mary Washington as an undergraduate and has an MFA from George Mason University (2008). Her chapbook, In Search of the Wild Dulcimer, is from Finishing Line Press (2016). Austin has lived in England, Italy, and Washington, DC, but she currently resides in Alabama, where she is an adjunct instructor in the English department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Also a journalist, Austin has written for numerous newspapers and magazines.
For more information visit: https://www.lanakwaustin.com/
Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in Loudon County with her husband Dick, a retired engineer. Her weekly column for the Loudon County News Herald is in its 40th year. She writes stories for young people, poetry, and novels (The War at Home and Emmy, both reissued by Tellico Books, an imprint of Iris Publishing Group, both originally published by Margaret McElderry Books, Macmillan, now Simon Schuster). The novels received various awards: The War at Home was placed on the ALA List of Best Books for Young Adults, both books were selected by the New York City Library as Books for the Teen Age, The War at Home was nominated to the 1991-92 Volunteer State Book Award Master List, and Emmy was selected as a Notable 1992 Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications and has won many awards. She has two chapbooks from Finishing Line Press, Slow Children Playing and Regret Comes to Tea. Her full-length collection, Household Inventory, received the Brick Road Poetry Press Award in 2013. She was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the East Tennessee Hall of Fame for Writers and was honored by the Arts Council of Oak Ridge. She does volunteer teaching for the Oak Ridge Institute of Continued Learning (ORICL), and frequently leads writing workshops.
Robert Lee Kendrick grew up in Illinois and Iowa, but now calls South Carolina home. After earning his M.A. from Illinois State University and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, he held a number of jobs, ranging from house painter to pizza driver to grocery store worker to line cook. He now lives in Clemson with his wife, and their dog. His poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, Louisiana Literature, The Cape Rock, and elsewhere.
Born in Nicholson, Georgia in 1924, the daughter of a rural farmer and a mail carrier, Lewis attended Georgia State College for Women (1943-1946) where she joined in the work for women’s rights, civil rights, and social justice. With a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky, she has taught Appalachian Studies and lectured widely at regional colleges and universities, made films with Appalshop Film Studios, organized health clinics through Highlander Center, organized exchanges of American and Welsh coal miners and southern African and American women entrepreneurs. She is a teacher, theorist, activist, and public intellectual, with numerous awards and honorary doctoral degrees from Emory and Henry College and Wake Forest Seminary.
Helen Lewis has published hundreds of articles, monographs and reviews, and a number of important books in regional scholarship. Her most recent publication is her collection of writings and commentary, with contributions by notable scholars, which shaped the field of Appalachian Studies: Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia (Patricia Beaver and Judith Jennings, eds.) University Press of Kentucky, 2012.
Nellie Goodwin received her MFA from the Goddard College Writing Program. She has published poetry in The Comstock Review and The Aurorean. She is a member of poet Susan Donnelly’s workshop “Class Act Poets.” She lives and writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.