Susan Comninos is a widely published poet and author of a recent book of poems, “Out of Nowhere” (Stephen F. Austin Univ. Press/Texas A&M, 2022). Her individual poems have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review, among others. She’s the winner of Tablet magazine’s Poem-in-Your-Pocket award, and more. Since 2017, she’s taught writing to undergraduates at Siena College, The College of St. Rose, and most recently SUNY Albany, as well as diverse groups of adults in the community. She lives in Guilderland, NY.

Leslie B. Neustadt is a retired attorney, poet and collage artist. Author of Bearing Fruit: a Poetic

Journey, her work is inspired by the beauty and power of the natural world, life’s joys and struggles, and an unwavering commitment to human and civil rights. Her poems have been published  in anthologies including Veils, Halos & Shackles, International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, Rumors Secrets & Lies: Stories & Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice, Musematrix, and Heels Into the Soil: Stories & Poems Resisting the Silence. She is a board member of the International Women’s Writing Guild and chairs its program committee. She produces a popular workshop series for the Guild. Her book, The Sustenance of Stars, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in June of this year.

Jay Rogoff has published seven collections of poetry, including The Cutoff, which won the Word Works Washington Prize. His books from Louisiana State University Press include The Long Fault, The Art of Gravity, Enamel Eyes, and, most recently, Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems. His new book, Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods, received the Lewis P. Simpson Award for outstanding literary criticism. His poetry and criticism have appeared

widely, in such places as AGNI, Georgia Review, Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Salmagundi,

and Southern Review. A longtime dance critic, he is working on Balanchine Is Now! an exploration of how George Balanchine’s ballets express interior human life, and on a book-length poem. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.  Photo credit: Penny Howell Jolly.

After a peripatetic life in Jewish education and founding an internet copyediting business, Rhonda Rosenheck moved to upstate New York for the foliage. Her writing takes inspiration from nature, relationships, her inner world, the zeitgeist, and ancient texts. In June 2023, she was the resident writer at Iceland’s Fish Factory Arts Centre. She edited/published the anthology, Thriving, for which she won a NYSCA grant. Other books include The Five Books of Limericks, Looking, and Yiddische Yoga: OYsanas for Every Generation. She self-published the song, Sin No More! A Biblical Sea Shanty. Her poems have appeared in small journals and anthologies. One was performed at the Fenimore Art Museum’s Glimmer Globe Theatre. She co-hosts a live, monthly poetry circle and serves on the Hudson Valley Writers Guild’s board as anthology publisher and internship coordinator.

Maxim D. Shrayer, author, scholar and translator, is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Born in Moscow in 1967 to a writer’s family, Shrayer grew up as a refusenik and  emigrated to the United States in 1987. He has authored and edited over 25 books in English and Russian, among them the internationally acclaimed memoirs, Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story and Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, the collection of novellas, A Russian Immigrant, and, most recently, the literary memoir Immigrant Baggage and the poetry collection, Kinship. Shrayer is the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works have been translated into eleven languages. Visit Shrayer’s website at www.shrayer.com and follow him @MaximDShrayer.

Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer is 10th-grader at Brookline High School in Massachusetts. A fourth-generation writer, Tatiana is the author of the poetry collection Searching for Bow and Arrows (2020), which won second prize in the inaugural 2019 Stone Soup book contest. Her poetry and translations from the Russian have been featured in Stone Soup, Teen Writers Project, KidSpirit, Four Centuries, American High School Poets, Iron Words Israel, Jewish Journal of LA, and other magazines and anthologies. Her new poetry collection, The Disappearing Bridge, is forthcoming from Liquid Cat Books.

Barbara Ungar’s sixth book, After Naming the Animals, is just out from The Word Works, which also published Immortal Medusa and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life. Her prior book, Save Our Ship, won the Snyder Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and a Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association, and was a Distinguished Favorite at the Independent Press Awards. Earlier books include The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Prize and an Eric Hoffer award. The Standish Chair in English at The College of Saint Rose, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. www.barbaraungar.net