Joy Clark received her MFA from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR in 2020. She works for the local nonprofits Art Ventures and The Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, and is the new 2022 editor for eMerge. Her work can be read in places such as The Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades Magazine, and Bayou Magazine.

Woody Barlow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Olathe, Kansas. He is the author of Tarzan Wore Chaps and The Aluminum Ballet.

A native of Chicago’s South Side, Mary Lewis’s career began in 1977 as editorial assistant of Ebony Jr!, Johnson Publishing’s magazine for children. Six months later she became managing editor and in 1980 became a fulltime freelancer. Articles for children and adults followed, as did editing and proofreading projects. She’s been published in American Visions and Black Enterprise magazines. She’s the author of Herstory, about Black teenage girls. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Sleeping with One Eye Open, a Chicago Tribune critic’s choice; In Praise of Our Teachers; and Under Her Skin.

Laurence Foshee is a Tulsa, Oklahoman with poetry and prose in Dragon Poet Review, The Drabble, The Tulsa Review, and a forthcoming Oklahoma anthology honoring the memory of The Greenwood District. When not reading and writing poetry, his work in patient transport during the entire first year of the Covid-19 pandemic has driven him to resume pre-health studies and pursue osteopathic medicine. He hopes to find commonalities in helping others within these disparate, higher callings.

Khadidja Bouchellia is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Arkansas. She is affiliated with the Middle East Studies program where she works as an instructor, translator, and an assistant. She is working towards completing a dissertation on Muslim women’s reproductive rights and justice in North Africa and the Middle East. Khadidja immigrated to the United States from Algeria in 2017, and has been navigating life in the American South.

Sam Savello (she/her/hers) is a writer, poet and marketing manager living in Philadelphia. Sam has a degree in Hispanic Literature from Brown University and has been published in Every Day Fiction, Sunlight Press and Anti-heroine Chic.

Kyle Stück was born in the jungles of Ecuador. After arriving in the United States, he learned what jaywalking was and eventually earned a B.S. in Digital Cinema. When he's not hosting the art podcast Humming Fools, penning the comic book series Evil Cast, or describing himself in the third-person, he busies himself by absorbing all forms of media and or eating/drinking with his fan base, all of whom he normally refers to as his “friends and family.”

Louise Krug is an associate professor of English at Washburn University. She is the author of two memoirs about brain surgeries that she had in her twenties, Louise: Amended (one of Publishers Weekly's Best 20 books of 2012) and Tilted: The Post Brain-Surgery Journals, recipient of the Hefner-Heinz Kansas Book Award in 2018. She has published essays in The Huffington Post, River Teeth, Juked, various anthologies, and elsewhere. She lives in Topeka, Kansas with her family.

Ken Waldman combines original poetry, old-time string-band music, and smart storytelling for a performance uniquely his. Touring since 1995, he's appeared from the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage to the Dodge Poetry Festival to the Woodford Folk Festival (Queensland, Australia). 20 books consist of 16 full-length poetry volumes, a memoir, a creative writing manual, a kids' book, and his 2022 novel, Now Entering Alaska Time. Twelve CDs include two for children.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books, including, The Mercy of Traffic, winner of the Phillip H. McMath 2020 Post-Publication Award and five chapbooks. Her work appears in Atlanta Review, Mom Egg Review, pacificREVIEW and this spring Doubleback Books reprinted her 2008 book, Discount Fireworks as a free download.

Author of The Golem Verses, Flashes & Specks, and The Golem Returns, Diane's poems also appear in Nine Mile Literary Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, and Pop the Culture Pill. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is in A Coup of Owls.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, writer, and Yiddish literary translator. He is the author of two books of fiction, Beloved Comrades: a Novel in Stories (2020) and Prodigal Children in the House of G-d: Stories (2018), and six volumes of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). Prior to Blessed Hands: Stories, Taub's previous translation from the Yiddish was Dineh: an Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze (2022). Taub was a resident at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in autumn 2015.

Sidney Brammer has been an adjunct professor of creative writing at Austin Community College for 22 years. She has a BFA in Theatre from the University of Texas at Austin, MFA in Fiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University. Her first short story was published in 2009 in Southwest Review, her second story in Connotation Press in 2012. She is currently working on three novels, taking a break now and then to try shorter forms like poetry.

Elizabeth G. Howard is poet, journalist, and digital marketing specialist. She founded Demand Poetry in 2008, writing original poetry at virtual and live at events on her Olivetti 33 typewriter. Her writing has been published in Boston Literary Magazine, American Craft, Bentlily among many others. She is member of the Writing Workshop Kansas City and a resident of the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. She calls Iowa, London, and Kansas City home.

Anna Gall with her husband, Dean live in historic St. Charles, Missouri. Anna travels, gardens, cooks, teaches culinary classes at the local community college, antiques, reads, and writes two blogs on topics she is most passionate about, organic gardening, kitchen creations, home life, and wholeness as a woman. During her summer 2021 residency at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, Anna started her first book, a series of short stories with a culinary theme. Its publication should be in 2022.

Raven Nobles is an author. If you don’t find her pouring over poetry, you’ll find her serving her community through volunteering endeavors. She enjoys taking long walks in nature and pursuing adventure. Her love of words leaks onto pages and pours from her fingertips. As a child reading was her refuge and continues to be one of places she finds herself going to when stressed, happy or in need of time away. She has published pieces with Conway Scene and the UCA literary Magazine, The Vortex.

Rhonda Danette Owen is a writer, editor, and artist in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a stalwart of Arkansas journalism for more than 30 years, but now devotes her creative energy to short stories, poetry, painting, and mixed-media collage.

Dan was born and raised in Little Rock, AR. Educated piecemeal over 41 years at 6 universities and colleges, including the San Francisco Art Institute, Pratt Institute, and a BFA from Millersville University. Having a paternal grandmother and sister who were and are professional writers, Dan naturally started making art as a youth and never stopped. He worked as a graphic artist for over 40 years and started writing fiction around the year 2000. Currently, Dan is the Artist-in-Residence at Eureka Springs School of the Arts and belongs to a writing group that meets regularly at WCDH.

Christine Irving describes her poems as snapshots - sharply focused moments that tell a tale in a few essential words. Her favorite métier is poetry, but she also writes novels, plays and travel pieces. Christine is the author of: Be a Teller of Tales,The Naked Man, You Can Tell a Crone by Her Cackle, and Sitting on the Hag Site: A Celtic Knot of Poems. Her newest work Return to Inanna is undergoing its final proof.