Gustavo Adolfo Aybar is a graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City where he received his MA in Romance Languages & Literature. He is a Cave Canem and Artist Inc. fellow. He has served on the board of the Latino Writers Collective (501c3) and his work can be found in their anthology, Primera Pagina: Poetry from the Latino Heartland. Aybar is working on his next poetry manuscript and on translating the works of Mexican author/playwright Glafira Rocha from Spanish to English. Some translations of Rocha’s stories can be found in the online journals EZRA, Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation journal where Rocha’s short story “Interspersed Signs” was selected as a Pushcart nominee for Fiction in 2014.

Iris Appelquist is a native of Kansas City, Missouri. Her endeavor to carve out a niche for herself has been rewarded with publication of two full-length volumes of poetry, Blunt Trauma (Co-authored by Jason Ryberg, 2009, Spartan Press, KCMO), BRIAR (2012, Spartan Press, KCMO), and WHERE WE WERE WE WERE THERE (Spartan Press, 2015)  -- not to mention appearing to read and discuss poetry on her local NPR affiliate, in the local Kansas City Star, and several independent online and print magazines and journals. NICE FEELINGS, is a small collection that details the mystifying process of personal growth through the confessional style and surrealist conjecture.

Born: Kansas City, Missouri, Planet Earth, 1949, the year of the first Soviet nuclear test

Current Fascinations: words, painting, sculpture, the ancient world or the idea of it, particularly the rebuilding of it, silence and the absence of it, sleep and the same, dead bluesmen, ancient Asian poets, the demi-monde, espionage, imagined, not real, the primeval forest of Buddhism in all its humble glory, the savage comic tyranny of the political stage, the toxic and liberating proscenium of the internet, the dark  Jungian depths of the self, the flickering colored shadows of the cinema and architecture, the utopian possibilities of life on garden earth with our liberated sentient friends

Death: certain as to its eventuality but uncertain as to its time. Indifferent, but not unconcerned.

Wm. Anthony Connolly is the author of three novels

The Jenny Muck, Get Back and The Obituaries, which was a

Canadian bestseller. His work has appeared in The Rumpus,

Intellectual Refuge and Elephant Journal to name a few.

This is his debut poetry collection. He is on the faculty of

the MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University, St. Charles,

Missouri, and has taught academic writing in Texas and

Kansas. A first-generation university student, he has earned

a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University

of Missouri, and an MFA in Writing from Goddard College

in Plainfield, Vermont. He and his wife Dyan and their two

dogs, Hemingway Short Story and Professor Leo Tolstoy,
currently reside in the Lone Star State.

John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) and Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016).  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com

Seth Elkins is from Decorah, IA. He enjoys hunting agates and mushrooms, drinking whiskey and shooting pool. And Mike’s goat army.

Charly “the city mouse” Fasano is a poet, block printer, and film maker from Ithaca, NY via Denver, Colorado. As a spoken word performer he has opened up and has shared the stage with Lucero, Drag the River, The Queers, Crime in Stereo, Mark Mallman, Matson Jones, Land Lines, Cory Branan, Ken Arkind, and William Trowbridge. He is the co-founder of cassette tape and book label – Fast Geek Press, Pretend You Can Read audio zine, and As Well As Magazine. He has released a vinyl EP backed by the music of Lucero, a CD, two cassette tapes and four books of poems. His films and music videos have appeared at prickofthespindle.com, movingpoems.com, Westword.com and The Onion’s AV Club Online. Please visit cmousefasano.com and cmousefasano.tumblr.com.

In 1984, the same year the White Bu alo Café and Emporium closed its doors, three-year-old Melissa Fite Johnson moved to Pittsburg, KS. She never left. The town fostered in her a love of literature and writing. She earned a Master’s Degree in English Literature from Pittsburg State University and teaches English at her alma mater, Pittsburg High School. Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Broadsided Press, Midwest Quarterly, Red Paint Hill Journal, and elsewhere, and her latest collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. Melissa and her husband, Marc, live in Pittsburg with their four backyard chickens. Connect with her online at melissafitejohnson.com.

Sara Nicole Glass, aka Miss Conception, is a hip-hop conscious emcee, performance artist and winner of 2014's Best Poet category with Pitch Magazine's Best of KC vote. She is also a pro on the hula hoops and other flow toys, keeping the momentum exciting!  More recently, tapping into fire dancing and burlesque, her style is unique and always evolving.  She loves the festival culture and creating experiences that set the vibe.  You can find her online at www.themissconception.com.

Jason Hardung’s work has been published in many journals and magazines like Thrasher Magazine, 3AM, Chiron Review, New York Quarterly, Evergreen Review and Word Riot to name a few.  He has published two full length books of poetry: The Broken and the Damned on Epic Rites Press, 2009 and The Names of Lost Things on Lummox Press, 2012.  He lives in Ft.Collins, Colorado where he lives on a commune and rides a Schwinn for transportation.

Poet Jen Harris is a Kansas City-based Spoken Word Poet, activist, published author, founder and host of KC Poetry Slam. Harris graduated Cum Laude from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in May 2015 with a Bachelor of Liberal Arts, emphases in Communication Studies, English Language and Literature. She is the recipient of the 2015 UMKC Jim Wanser Pride Award for outstanding LGBT community activism in Kansas City. Additionally, she is the recipient of the 2014-2016 The Pitch magazine's Top 3 Poets in Kansas City award and the 2009 ACP Kansas Journalist of the Year.

Dennis Hodges believes that everyone is creative.

All of his work is focused on helping others get in touch

with their creativity, where he serves as a creative catalyst

or “creatalyst.” He is a fine-art photographer, a strategist

and, as may be apparent, passionate about nurturing

creativity and creative thinking. This is his first book.

He lives in Kansas with his wife, Judit. Dennis presents

engaging keynotes and workshops worldwide on creativity

and creative thinking. For booking information please

contact him at dennis @ DennisHodgesSpeaks.com

Adam Jameson was born and raised in Pittsburg, Kansas He is a 1995 graduate of Pittsburg State University, where he earned a B.A. in History. His Whitmanesque job history includes self-employed construction, UPS, and Kansas City Southern Railroad. He currently works as an Estimator for Westar Energy. Adam started writing poetry in high school and has spent the last 25 years performing with White Buffalo Poetry and Blues. His poems have appeared in Harp, The Little Balkans Review, and To the Stars through Difficulty, and his latest collection of poetry, #9 to Sallisaw, was released in 2013 by Little Balkans Press. Adam lives in rural Pittsburg with his wife Meredith and son Cole; his favorite past times are chasing pheasants in the fields of western Kansas and catching slab crappie in the strip pits around Pittsburg.

Former co-owner of White Buffalo Café and Emporium and founding member of White Buffalo, J.T. Knoll has twice been awarded first place in column writing by The Kansas Press Association as a columnist for The Morning Sun. He has performed original songs and poetry in a myriad of venues across the country and led mindfulness and training workshops throughout the Midwest. His poetry has appeared in journals such as The Midwest Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Chameleon, and The Little Balkans Review. His published collections include Paperboy, True Stories, Entry / Exit Point, Chorus Line, Where the Pavement Ends, and Fetch Crazy. He lives, with his wife, Linda, and Arlo the Labradorian on Euclid’s curve in Pittsburg, Kansas where he operates Knoll Training and Consulting. An ambivert, he is equally at home meditating and reading in his room as singing and reciting poetry in a performance hall.

Ezhno is a sad clown who recently broke out of rehab because Ezhno couldn't stand sobriety and the preponderance of positive outlooks concurrently. Ezhno used to have a cat named Furlinghetti, but the cat found Ezhno tedious and stopped showing up for dinner. Ezhno doesn't believe in pronouns, and is focusing on publishing others these days through the press EMP and possible other projects. Ezhno has been strictly forbidden from ever mentioning them by name, because Ezhno is the dysentery of all functions social, and many credit granting institutions have made it explicitly clear that they won't do business with any of Ezhno's associates. Ezhno is working on a third book of poems now. The second, called #Beer, was the inaugural project of EMP, and is only available for beer.

TLDR: Find Ezhno, provide lots of beer.

Erin McGrane is a musician, songwriter, producer, workshop presenter, actress, and poet. Her first poem was published at the tender age of ten when she placed 3rd in a contest for the Iowa Poetry Day Association with a poem about the loneliness of the prairie. Overtones is her first published book of poetry and lyrics. Erin hosts the TV program CINEMAKC for Kansas City Public Television; she also appeared in an Emmy-winning web series and the Oscar-nominated film Up in the Air, alongside George Clooney. Erin is an ArtsKC Inspiration Grant recipient and a Mid-America Arts Alliance Professional Development Grant recipient, and an ArtistINC fellow where she serves as a peer facilitator.
Her current project, Victor & Penny, is a prohibition-era jazz duo for which she writes, sings and plays ukulele with former Blue Man Group guitarist, Jeff Freling. The nationally-touring duo was a 2013 Escape To Create artist-in-residence and was named, "Best Folk Ensemble" by the PITCH 2015. Erin holds a B.A. in Theatre Performance from UMKC with an emphasis in creative writing and she is proud to say she misspent her youth singing in a rock band.

Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. He was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in over 100 different magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, I-70 Review and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award.

Al Ortolani’s poetry and reviews have appeared in journals such as Rattle, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The Writer’s Almanac, and the New York Quarterly, and his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He has published several collections of poetry, including His Waving Mustard in Surrender (NYQ Books), which was short-listed for Binghamton University's Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and Paper Birds Don’t Fly, released in April 2016 by New York Quarterly Books. Al has served on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, e Brick Mountain Foundation, The Little Balkans Press, and currently sits on the board of Woodley Press at Washburn University in Topeka. He regularly drank coffee at the White Buffalo Café and Emporium and was once photographed eating the largest baloney sandwich ever served at 7th and Broadway.

Shawn Pavey is the author of Talking to Shadows (Main Street Rag Press, 2008) and Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 (Spartan Press, 2015), Co-founder and former Associate Editor of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal, and a former board member and officer of The Writers Place, a Kansas City-based literary non-profit.  In 2010, he served as a Poet in Residence for the now defunct PresentMagazine.com.  His poems, essays, and journalism appear in a variety of national and regional publications.  A graduate of the University of North Carolina’s Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Program, he likes his Tom Waits loud, his bourbon single barrel, and his basketball Carolina Blue. 

Jeanette Powers is your regular whirling dervish eating a cadence of circling sharks. She is the programming director of performance art venue, Arts Bar. She is co-creator of Spartan Press' innovative series, POP Poetry: #12poetsin12months hosted by Prospero's Books. She is editor in abetting at Stubborn Mule Press with a focus on featuring critical, modern, revolutionary voices whose books transcend typical formatting and typography. She most recently has been awarded an ArtsKC Inspiration Grant and two Artist in Residencies: Osage Arts Community in the Missouri Ozarks and Red Gate Residency in Beijing, China. jeanettepowers.com

Jason Preu is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn but does live online at jasonpreu.wordpress.com.

Jason Ryberg is the author of nine books of poetry,six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors, and a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel.
He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and an aspiring b-movie actor. His latest collections of poems are "Motel, Diner, Liquor" and "Beauty Parlors, Train Yards And
Everything In Between" (both available from Spartan Press, 2014) He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe. Feel free to look up his skirt at jasonryberg.blogspot.com.

Crista Siglin graduated with a BFA in Painting and Creative Writing from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015. In Kansas City, she has shown her visual work at the Dodge Painting Gallery, Blue Djin Gallery, Vacant Farm, Green Lady Gallery, ArtsBar, Night Blooms Darkroom and Bookstore, and H&R Block Artspace. In the fall of 2015, she debuted internationally, showing a collaboration installed at the LUMA Westbau museum in Zürich, Switzerland. The exhibition, entitled Filter Bubble, was curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist. 
Crista has performed her poetry for the Common Sense Reading Series, Blue Mondays, the dotPOPshop!, the Kansas City Museum, Prospero’s Bookstore, and Night Blooms Darkroom and Bookstore. She has been published in Sprung Formal, KCAI’s Compendium, Not Sorry Zine, and Retrograde Craft. Siglin released her first book of poetry, Fleeting, Sacred with Spartan Press in 2015. Her practice—paralleled in both visual and written works—is an exploration of the body and the mind’s relationship to environment, trauma, time, and phantasmagoria.

David Smith lives somewhere in California. His collections are Closer to Jesus, Rockets Red Glare - the Handsome Duke Deal and Kid Mingo Letters (with Scott Wannberg), Genocide Sutra, and White Time. Long ago and far away he was the editor of Ouija Madness Press and Ouija Madness magazine and has written for the LA Reader. He used to belong to AARP, but didn’t bother to renew his membership. He has a few addictions, which he’ll review with you if you’d like. He has made a living for a dozen years as a bartender, which is perhaps the most noble profession of all, and can make an El Presidente which will leave you week at the knees and begging for more.

G.M.H. Thompson was born on February 15th, 1990, at about 12 midnight, in a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.

George Wallace is an American poet of celebration and witness.  He has stood with Cindy Sheehan, Poets Against The War, Poets Responding to SB 1070 and Occupy Wall Street. Editor of Poetrybay, co-editor of Great Weather for Media, author of twenty-six chapbooks, and a regular performer in NYC, his US appearances include the Woody Guthrie Festival, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, National Steinbeck Center, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Gordon Parks Museum, The Beat Museum, Macks Backs Books and Prospero’s Books. Internationally, he has appeared at the Robert Burns Centre, Dylan Thomas Centre, Brantwood, Swarthmore Hall, and in Paris, Athens and Rome. An adjunct professor of poetry at Pace University in Manhattan, he is currently writer in residence at Walt Whitman Birthplace.

Brandon Whitehead is originally from Oklahoma, where there are generally only two accepted ways in which a man may express himself: silence or rage. Brandon studied violin at the University of Kansas. Yes. Violin. Brandon likes to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and play role-playing games. Brandon has been a furniture mover, a short-order cook, a movie and music reviewer, a bartender, a camera operator for a local news station, a warehouse foreman for a blood bank and a courier of bio-hazardous materials. Brandon is one of the last of the old time projectionists. Brandon has a really cool collection of robot and spaceship toys which you are not allowed to touch. He lives in KCKS, in a tiny apartment that doesn't adhere to normal Euclidean geometry. He spends his nights writing poems and stories while listening to the strange old man that lives above him play the violin. His short story collection Outpost 4423 and Other Stories is available on Amazon Kindle. His poetry book "Thieves, Pharaohs and Mexican Daredevils" can be purchased by email. He is available for children's parties.

Please bear with us while we continue to add to our author lineup