Submissions

Michael McDermott is a retired physician and social activist. He has lived at Brigit Rest in Black Earth, Wisconsin for over 30 years. During this time he has worked to develop Brigit Rest into a retreat for artists and activists based on a reverence for the land and as a setting for Celtic influenced spirituality. He has provided Brigit Rest as home for the Black Earth Institute. As a social activist, Michael McDermott has been involved in the key issues of the last 40 years, including civil rights, labor causes, opposition to war, woman’s struggle for equality, and protection of the earth from environmental degradation and destruction. He also spent time in Nicaragua teaching medicine and helping people in the town of Esteli to plan and build a health clinic, returning to Chicago to raise money to assist in successfully build the clinic. He is committed to bringing a spiritual awareness to the pressing need to change society. He sees the profound importance of placing his work within the experience and suffering of ordinary people.

Richard Cambridge’s poetry and theater productions address controversial themes on the American political landscape. His poetry has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Nantucket Journal, Asheville Poetry Review and others. He was a member of the Boston Championship Slam Team in 1992, and won the Masters Slam at the National Poetry Slam in 1997. His awards include The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize and he was a finalist for a residency at the Fine Arts Work Shop in Provincetown, MA. He is a long-time resident of Cambridge, MA where he curates the Poets’ Theater at Club Passim. In 2003 he received the Cambridge Peace and Justice Award for the contributions of his art and activism.

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s eighth book is Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts, a poetry/photography collaboration with Wilfried Raussert, with translations into Spanish by the Women in Translation group (Guadalajara University Press, 2023). Her seventh book is Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023) and her fifth, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay, is Mississippi. With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology and is coediting The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II (forthcoming, Trinity University Press, 2025). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, Ann has had Fulbrights to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and Uppsala University, Sweden; and artist residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, The Mesa Refuge, Camac, and Storyknife. Her awards and prizes include three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission, and fifteen Pushcart nominations. She retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the undergraduate minor in Environmental Studies.

Jacqueline Johnson is a multi-disciplined artist creating in poetry, fiction writing and fiber arts. She is the author of A Woman’s Season, on Main Street Rag Press, and A Gathering of Mother Tongues, published by White Pine Press, and is the winner of the Third Annual White Pine Press Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in “This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets,” edited by Kwame Alexander, Little Brown, February 2024; “Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era,” Routledge 2020; The Slow Down, American Public Media, October 16, 2019 and “Pank: Health and Healing Folio” 2019. Ms. Johnson has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Mid Atlantic Writers Association’s Creative Writing Award in Poetry and McDowell Colony for the Arts. She is a Cave Canem fellow, VONA Fiction fellow and BEI fellow 2018-2021. Works in progress include “The Privilege of Memory,” and “How to Stop a Hurricane,” a collection of short stories and “This America,” a poetry collection. She is a graduate of New York University and the City University of New York. A native of Philadelphia, PA., she resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Marjory Wentworth is the New York Times bestselling author of Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets (with Kwame Alexander and Chris Colderley). Her books of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle and New and Selected Poems. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize seven times. She is also the co-writer of We Are Charleston, Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel, with Herb Frazier and Dr. Bernard Powers and Taking a Stand, The Evolution of Human Rights, with Juan E. Mendez. She is co-editor with Kwame Dawes of Seeking, Poetry and Prose inspired by the Art of Jonathan Green, and the author of the prizewinning children’s story Shackles. Wentworth is the South Carolina Director of Poetry in Precincts. She served as the poet laureate of South Carolina from 2003–2017. In 2020, she was named a National Coalition Against Censorship Free Speech is for Me Advocate. Wentworth teaches courses in writing, social justice, and banned books at The College of Charleston, where she is part of the Social Justice Working Group for the Center for the Study of Slavery and the Afghan Refugee Circle of Welcome.