2025 Poets
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Kendall A. Bell's poetry has been most recently published in As It Ought To Be and First Literary Review-East. He was nominated for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net collection seven times. He is the author of five full length collections, "The Roads Don't Love You" (2018), "the forced hush of quiet" (2019), "the shallows" (2022), "all of this bruising" (2024), "all i have in my hands" (2025), and 37 chapbooks, the latest being "The Contortionist". He is the publisher/editor of Maverick Duck Press and editor and founder of Chantarelle's Notebook. His chapbooks are available through Maverick Duck Press. He lives in Southern New Jersey.
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Chad Frame is the author of Little Black Book, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award, Cryptid, and Smoking Shelter, winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. He is Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His work appears in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, on iTunes from the Library of Congress, and is archived on the moon with The Lunar Codex.
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Miriam Kramer is a queer, Jewish poet residing in New Jersey with her partner, daughter, and two cats. She was the winner of the 2023 Jack McCarthy Book Prize. Miriam loves stick figure drawings, bright sneakers, and embroidery. Her debut full length collection, Built by Storms, was published by Write Bloody Publishing and nominated for The Lambda Literary Prize and The New Writers Award, Great Lakes College Association. Find her on social media: miriadwords.
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Peter E. Murphy is the author of thirteen books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, most recently, A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption and You Too Were Once on Fire (September 2025). His prose and poetry have appeared in Guernica, Hippocampus, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Poetry Wales, Rattle, The Sun and elsewhere. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City which runs the annual Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway.
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BJ Ward is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems 1990-2013 (North Atlantic Books), which received the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The New York Times, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Sun, among others, and have been featured on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” and the website Poetry Daily. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and two Distinguished Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He lives in rural northwest Jersey with his wife, son, and two cats.
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Basia Wilson is a poet. A Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize, her poetry and reviews have appeared in Tribes Magazine, Philadelphia Stories, Voicemail Poems, bedfellows, Platform Review, Cider Press Review, Barrelhouse, and The Rumpus. She walks, wonders and writes in South Jersey.
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Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American poet and artist from Newark, NJ. A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2024 Luso-American fellow in the DISQUIET Literary Program, Carreira is the author of Dead Things and Where to Put Them (Cavankerry, October 2025) Desgracada (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Tanto Tanto (Cavankerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing To That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Carreira works in higher education and teaches Women and Gender Studies at Kean University. She lives with her girls (daughters and pups) in Union, NJ.
Instagram: @savethebathewater
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Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides near Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Through the Lens of Time” (2026), a forthcoming fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing, and “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things” (2022), a book of poetry from Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize and BOTN nominee. Her passions include Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-racism, ballet, the Seven Summits, the Hamilton Soundtrack, motherhood, and acquiring more cats.
Twitter & Bluesky: @shannonfrostgre Insta: @zarathustra_speaks
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Elinor Mattern is a poet, artist, and educator who seeks out the spiritual threads in the realm of the arts. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and teaches creative writing and poetry workshops. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Paterson Literary Review, and Tiferet, A Journal of Spiritual Poetry, among others.
In this workshop, “What Makes a Metaphor,” you will play with original language and image-making on the way to creating a new poem.
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Dimitri Reyes is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist, content creator, and educator from Newark, New Jersey. He has been named one of The Best New Latinx Authors of 2023 by LatinoStories.com for his most recent book, Papi Pichón (Get Fresh Books, 2023) which was a finalist for the Omnidawn chapbook contest and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. His other books include Every First and Fifteenth, the winner of the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Award, and the poetry journal Shadow Work for Poets, now available on Amazon. Dimitri’s work has been featured on NPR and PBS, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. He was an inaugural poetry fellow for the Poets & Writers Get The Word Out publishing incubator as well as a 2024 fellow with the NJ Arts Professional Learning Institute. You can find more of his writing in Poem-a-Day, Verse Daily, Até Mais: Latinx Futurisms, and elsewhere. Dimitri is the Marketing & Communications Director at CavanKerry Press.
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Lennox Warner, emigrated from Montserrat, West Indies in 1970 and settled in South Jersey by way of Brooklyn, New York to pursue a career in the Casino Industry. Along the way Lennox attended art schools in South Jersey, New York City and Philadelphia respectively at the Art Student League of New York and Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia.
However my formative years in the USA were in Brooklyn NYC. There I got exposed to the Art world while pursuing my undergraduate AAS, Associate degree at New York City Technical College and obtaining my BBA in Business administration at Baruch College City University of New York while taking art classes.
In pursuit of an art career, I have exhibited widely in South Jersey, Philadelphia and New York City. I have exhibited at the Noyes Arts Garage, Atlantic City, Wheaton Arts, Millville New Jersey, the Perkins Art Center, Collingswood, New Jersey, the Dwyer Cultural Center Harlem, New York, Brooklyn public library, Linden Blvd, Brooklyn, the Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn, the Jamaica cultural Center (JCAL), Queens New York, City Hall, Philadelphia,PA, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia PA and the Icebox, Philadelphia PA over the past 10 years. In 2020, I published my first book of poems titled, Mother”s Milk”, it is presently on sale on Amazon. My next book of poems, “My Poetic Demons”, will be available in the Summer of 2025.
My goals are to continue creating art, writing and reading poetry to highlight my "Wind Rush Caribbean” experiences and about the beautiful rough and tumble world around me.
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Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches poetry at West Windsor Art Center and English at Rowan College at Burlington County. Her books include her latest chapbooks, The Quarantina Chronicles (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020) and The Unacknowledged Legislator (Empty Chair Press, 2019), along with Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press, 2018), and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014). Her new collection, States of Grace, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in the fall of 2025. She is the Board President of the Poetry by the Sea Conference, an annual 4-day conference which takes place in Madison, CT, and the editor of the online poetry journal for women formalists, Mezzo Cammin.
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Lauren Hilger received a BA from New York University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) and Morality Play (Poetry NW Editions, 2022). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Poetry Foundation's online archive, NEA's Poetry Out Loud, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.
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Kathleen Volk Miller’s book, “Teaching Writing Through Journaling: Journaling as a Tool for Learning and Well Being” will be released by Bloomsbury Press in October, 2025. She has written for LitHub, NYT Modern Love, O, the Oprah magazine, Salon, the NYTimes, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Family Circle, Philadelphia Magazine and other venues. She is co-editor of the anthology, Humor: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is co-editor of The Painted Bride Quarterly and co-host of PBQ’s podcast, Slush Pile. She has also published in literary magazines, such as Drunken Boat, Opium, and other venues. She holds “Healing through Writing” workshops, and other memoir classes. She consults on literary magazine start up, working with college students, and getting published in literary magazines. She is a professor at Drexel University.
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Author, educator, and organizer, Reet Starwind is a Collingswood Book Fest regular who looks forward to the event every year. "The Interstellar Storyteller" tells tales of worlds of emotion and imagination through screenwriting and poetry. Recently, he's performed for Rutgers Camden's Rites of Passage graduation ceremony and provided libation for the city of Camden's Juneteenth celebration. He's host to Camden's only late-night poetry workshop, 'the midnight notes,' now in its third year across both Nick Virgilio and now Rutgers Camden Writers Houses. When he isn't being active in the community, he's carving away at his passion project, 'Dreamers' Playlist,' an action-adventure urban fantasy project made in collaboration with his creative team. Dreamers' merges animation, music, and visual art alongside original scripts for a storytelling experience unlike any other.
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As a mixed-race child of the 80’s, Martin Wiley grew up confronting and embracing a world as mixed and confused as he was, surrounded by beautiful words one minute and screamed hate the next. A long time activist, spoken-word artist, and slam poet, after marrying the love of his life he settled down and saw his work shift back onto the page. After receiving a degree from Goddard College, he went on to receive his MFA from Rutgers Camden, where he was a Rutgers University Fellow. He had begun to see himself as a “recovering poet” but his children’s growing love of words dragged him, mostly happily, off the wagon. His work has appeared in journals like Apiary, Philadelphia Stories, The Northern Virginia Review, The Northridge Review, Conspire, and others. His first book, a chapbook titled Just/More, was released in January 2022 from Finishing Line Press, and his full-length debut poetry collection, When Did We Stop Being Cute?, was released in 2023 by CavanKerry Press. Martin remains in Philadelphia, teaching at Arcadia University, being a dad and husband, and finding time, when possible, to write.
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Hadassah Iris Broughton is a junior at Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart. Raised by her mother and father alongside three sisters, she found her voice early through poetry, often writing heartfelt pieces for her mother on Mother's Day.
In eighth grade, she joined speech and debate, where performing poetry sparked a deep passion for spoken word. By high school, she discovered Poetry Out Loud, and during a sophomore English assignment, her recitation stunned her teacher—who told her, “This classroom stage is too small for your voice.”
That moment launched her journey through the competition circuit. Out of over 12,300 students statewide, she became New Jersey’s State Champion. From there, she advanced to the national level, where she was ranked the top performer in the Northeast and placed in the top nine out of more than 157,000 student participants in the 2025 Poetry Out Loud competition.
Hadassah believes in the power of language to move people and drive change. She hopes to channel her passion for public speaking into a career as a criminal and social justice attorney.