Poets

    Ethar Hamid is a beginning writer. She likes to write pieces that have themes of mental illness and recovery. She hopes that her writing one day serves as therapy for people suffering from mental health issues, whether as formal bibliotherapy or informal cathartic reading. Currently diagnosed with schizophrenia, she’d like to help others facing similar conditions.

Ethar also writes pieces that reflect nuances in the human condition, experience, and struggle. She studied at George Mason Univ. and the University of Iowa, for undergrad. She's currently enrolled in an MA in English literature with Eastern New Mexico University, ENMU online. She hopes to work in teaching, publishing, and nonprofits, after graduation--especially in alternative high schools, local community colleges, minority-serving colleges, socially-conscious presses, community development nonprofits, and literary and arts nonprofits.

Ethar has experience in after-school tutoring; teaching evening classes in ESL; behavior technician work; graphic design; food pantry support; and office support. She lived before in Sudan, the U.A.E., and Qatar. She now lives in Sterling, Virginia, as she has for most of her life.

Her writings can be found at Finding a Peaceful Place: https://findingapeacefulplace.wordpress.com/about/

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Shree Gupta   is a student of Computer Science but also an aspiring writer, with particular interest in poetry.  Issues and things of the mind and soul especially hold her attention and she tries to express as much of those things that usually remain unsaid. The works of Robert Frost have caught her attention and interest since childhood. In the future, she wishes to travel the world and write about her learning and experiences of it!  Currently, she is studying at Amity University in Noida, India. 

For more poems & thoughts, visit her blogsite A Thousand Words.

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Laurie Kolp is an avid runner and lover of nature living in southeast Texas with her husband, three children, and two dogs. She is the author of Upon the Blue Couch and Hello, It's Your Mother.

She enjoys writing found poetry because it creates restraints and unleashes inhibitions at the same time. Laurie is currently working on a project to honor her father, who passed away unexpectedly in 2021.

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Valerie Nieman is a novelist and poet whose work draws on her life in Appalachia and the South.  Her most recent novel, Blood Clay, was a story of the New South that won the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Prize.
She was longtime a journalist but now is a professor of creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University. She was a founding editor of Kestrel and currently the poetry editor of Prime Number magazine.

From 2013-2014 Val was a North Carolina Arts Council poetry fellow and received an NEA creative writing fellowship as well as major grants in West Virginia and Kentucky.  Her second poetry collection, Hotel Worthy, poems about love, loss, and survival, is being published mid-March 2015 by Press 53 and is also available through Amazon. 

Rhiannon Thorne is the managing editor of cahoodaloodaling and a book reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has appeared, among others, in Existere, Foundling Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Conclave. 

Jonathan Butcher has had poetry appear in various print and online publications. His first chapbook 'Concrete Cradle' was published by Fire Hazard press in 2013, followed the next year by 'Broken Slates'  published by Flutter Press. He has been writing poetry for around nine years, and was for a short period involved as a sub-editor for an internationally distributed poetry zine named 'Unquiet Desperation'. He was born and lives in Sheffield, England.

Harry Calhoun has had work published in hundreds of poetry journals and more than a dozen books and chapbooks over the past three decades. His career has included Pushcart nominations, two Sundress Best of the Net nominations and publications in Abbey, Orange Room Review, Flutter Poetry Journal, Faircloth Review, Thunder Sandwich, Lily and others. Book publications have included I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf and The Black Dog and the Road. In 2011, Flutter Press published his chapbook The Insomnia Poems. 2012 was an exceedingly good year, with the publication of the limited-edition chapbook Maintenance and Death, the chapbook of love poems, How Love Conquers the World, and the collection of poems from the ‘80s and ’90s called Retro, Maintenance and Death has now gone to a second edition. The chapbook Failure is Unimportant came out on Flutter in 2013 and a full-length poetry book, Alarmed in Space and other poems, has been accepted by Unbound Content for release in early 2015. Harry lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife Trina and his dogs Hamlet and Harriet.