The 30/30 Project: Volunteer Poets

Jane Elias is an actor, writer, and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Recent theater includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and As You Like It at the Theater at Woodshill in upstate New York, the world premiere of the late Mark Medoff’s play Time and Chance at the Rio Grande Theatre in Las Cruces, NM, and the NYC premiere of Arlene Hutton’s Letters to Sala. Jane’s solo play Do This One Thing for Me premiered in the Estrogenius Festival and later ran in NYC at Access Theater, the TBG Theater, the Secret Theatre, and the NY International Fringe Festival. Her play Baby Steps was a finalist for the City Theatre National Award for Short Playwriting and the Heideman Award; and her play Girl Is Mine was a nominee for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her short film Placeholders, which she wrote and co-directed, had its NYC premiere at Cinema Village as part of the New York Short Film Festival. Jane’s poetry and fiction have appeared in literary magazines including Washington Square, The Southampton Review, translitmag, and podium. In spring 2020 she created #SonnetCoronaProject, a sequence in which she wrote a sonnet a day for 328 days during the COVID-19 pandemic, each work interpreted and performed by a different actor. She holds a BA in English from Duke University and an MFA in poetry from NYU. jane-elias.com.

Alix Jason is writer, bookbinder, and bad dog owner living in New Orleans. She runs her own bookbinding business (Bad Dog Books), is a contributing editor/bookbinder for Tilted House Press, and helps her friends self-publish their silly and serious zines. She loves to write about anxiety dreams, insomnia demons, letting things rot in her kitchen, and Bruce Springsteen. She has been published in Tilted House, Fine Print Press, and has self-published a lot of her own work.

After an on-again/off-again relationship with higher education and a decade in retail management, Heather Katzoff eventually earned a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and an MFA in creative writing, both from Rutgers University. She currently lives in central Pennsylvania, where teaches English at Harrisburg Area Community College. Her work has appeared in the Paterson Literary Review and Sixfold.

​​Jessica Kinnison’s work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Phoebe, Entropy, Juked, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her story “Star Party” placed second in the 2019 Tennessee Williams Festival Short Short Fiction Contest. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed as the first of eight New Orleans poets to watch in POETS & WRITERS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop.

Jessica Letteney edited and wrote technical documents for 30 years before she picked up a pen to write her own stories and poetry. Her first poem was about the wonder of wheeling stars in the night sky, and she has flattened a place in a meadow where she lies and listens to her heartbeat. A survivor of domestic abuse, Jessica writes to heal from that trauma and leads a weekly writing circle that is a safe space for others to write from their hearts and heal.

Khaya Osborne is an actor, massage therapist, & poet. Their work has appeared in many places such as Hooligan Magazine, Frontier Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, & a few mediocre musicians’ heartbreak songs.

P.F. Potvin is the author of the prose poetry collection The Attention Lesson (No Tell Books). His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, PANK, Short Edition, MiPOesias, PBS NewsHour, Sentence, Passages North, An Introduction to the Prose Poem anthology, and elsewhere. His manuscripts have been finalists for the New Issues Press Competition and Cleveland University’s Poetry Center Prize. Potvin has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Casa Libre en la Solana. He holds an MFA from Bennington College where he was awarded the Jane Kenyon poetry scholarship. Potvin teaches writing, chairs the campus writing awards, and serves as faculty advisor for the student-run journal Lyceum at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Jenny Stohlman is a poet living in Greenville, South Carolina. She attended Pratt Institute for Writing with an emphasis in poetry, a decision for which she thanks her 17 year old self often. Years later, she still finds poetry to be her most valuable life skill. You can find her at the Say What Poetry Open Mic most Sundays.

Hailey Williams (she/they) earned an MFA in Poetry at the College of Charleston, received her B.A. in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, and served as the 2019 Artist in Residence for the Dry Tortugas National Park. Hailey is the creative writing editor for Surge: The Lowcountry Climate Magazine, and her work has been published with Birmingham Poetry Review, Grim & Gilded, The Ekphrastic Review, Humana Obscura, and Free Verse Press, among others.

Josette Akresh-Gonzales is the author of “Apocalypse on the Linoleum” ( Lily Poetry Review Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, JAMA, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater Review, PANK, and many other journals. A recent poem has been included in the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket). She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Josette lives in the Boston area with her husband and two boys and rides her bike to work at a nonprofit medical publisher. Website: josettepoet.com. Twitter: @Vivakresh.

Vincent Michael Basso grew up in Beacon, New York and has made the State of New Mexico his home since 2002. He received his PhD in American Literary Studies from the University of New Mexico in 2019 and a MFA from the University of Southern Maine in 2010. Vincent’s poetry has appeared in Southwest American Literature, Zombie Logic Review, Future Earth Magazine, New Guard, and other journals. He has taught in higher education since 2011 and currently teaches English at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque, NM. Vincent is also a community behavioral health professional and has worked in that field since 2000.

Vincent loves teaching and supporting his students to develop as writers and critical thinkers. Whenever possible, he also apply narrative strategies and writing activities in mental health work. Finding ways to talk about our experiences and impressions, especially when those events are difficult to communicate or traumatic in nature, is critically important to our health and wellbeing. Without creative release and opportunities to imagine ourselves and our world in life affirming ways, we lack the ability to reconcile experience and find meaning in our lives. Poetry and creative writing provide me that release through freedom of expression and it’s that sense of possibility that Vincent tries to convey to his students and clientele.

Caroliena Cabada’s poetry has appeared in Whale Road Review, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. She teaches first-year composition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is earning her PhD in English. Her debut poetry collection, True Stories, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2024.

Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland. A graduate of Clemson University with a degree in English, her work has been published in The Bookends Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and elsewhere. Meredith serves as an associate editor for Arboreal Literary Magazine, a contributing editor for Barren Magazine, a staff reader for The Maine Review, and as an editor of From Glasgow to Saturn, the literary journal of the University of Glasgow, where she is currently pursuing an MLitt in Creative Writing.

Jessamyn Duckwall is a queer, autistic poet who lives and works in Oregon. They are an MFA candidate at Portland State University and serve as Co-Editor in Chief at The Portland Review. Their work has appeared in Same Faces Collective, Sylvia Magazine, Old Pal Magazine, Radar Poetry, Josephine Quarterly, Kithe Journal, and other publications. They’re on Instagram as @babydeadnettle.

Tracey Knapp’s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey has received awards and scholarships from La Romita School of Art in Terni, Italy, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets, The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, and has appeared in Poetry Daily, Rattle, Five Points, On the Seawall, San Diego Poetry Annual and elsewhere. ​She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Darwin Michener-Rutledge is a poet and translator. She is currently a student at Mount Holyoke College where she studies English and Art History and works at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Sheepshead Review, the Mount Holyoke Review, and Tales of Dionysus, a collaborative translation in print with the Univesity of Michigan Press.

Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He has an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in New Orleans Review, PANK Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Santa Fe Writers Project, Catapult, Massachusetts Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog and is the Poetry Editor at Peauxdunque Review. Romaguera was an Editorial Intern at Electric Literature. He is a VONA alum and a 2023 Periplus Fellow.