Ellen White Rook is a poet and contemplative arts teacher who divides her time between upstate New York and Maine. Retired from a career as an information technology manager for the State of New York, she now offers workshops and retreats that combine meditation, movement, and writing. She also teaches ikebana, Japanese flower arranging. Ellen holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Lindenwood University and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her works have been featured in various publications, including New Verse News, Black Fork, New Note Poetry, The Banyan Review, The Dewdrop, Trolley Literary Journal and more. Her first collection of poetry, Suspended (May, 2023), was selected by Cathexis Northwest Press in its unpublished author contest. She is married and has three adult daughters. Visit her website at ellenwhiterook.com.

In spring 2021, The Word Works Press published Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry, which made Small Press Distribution’s poetry bestseller list April through September, 2021, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was awarded the Silver Medal in Foreword Review’s Indies Book Award for Poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as a chapbook in 2020 and now in its third printing; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasah Tretheway, guest editor). A native New Yorker, she lives in New Hampshire and is founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University in Massachusetts

James Schlett is an award-winning author, poet and journalist. His first collection of poetry is children & bubbles: Haiku on Fatherhood (Red Moon Press, 2023). He is also the author of two historical narratives:  A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden: The Story of the Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015) and Frontier Struggles: Rollo May and the Little Band of New York Psychologists Who Saved Humanism (University of Akron Press, 2021). Frontier Struggles was named one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2022 by the American Library Association. A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden received an Adirondack Literary Award as the 2015 Best Book of Nonfiction. His essays have been published in History of Psychology, Songs of Innocence, New York Archives and the Mid-Atlantic Almanack. His haiku have been published in The Heron’s Nest, Acorn, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Stardust, Wild Plum, Under the Basho and bottle rockets.