Meet Our Poets ~ Profiles M
Mark MacDonald
Mark MacDonald is a retired high school English teacher living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has written poetry nearly all his life, but retirement has allowed the time in the morning he needs to create. He looks at poetry as "a criminal act, a type of theft: the poet steals the things of the day, plays with them for a while, then returns them to us renewed. His latest book, The Child Named Orange, is available on Amazon. Read.
Kristin Maffei
Kristin Maffei is a poet and copywriter living in New York City. She was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Oxford, and holds an MFA from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Fellow in poetry and co-curator of the NYU Emerging Writers Series at KGB Bar. Kristin’s poetry has been featured in Works & Days, Mount Hope Journal, American Athenaeum, qarrtsiluni, The Little Jackie Paper, and Underwater New York. She maintains a website for her work at www.kristinmaffei.com, and invites your visit. Read.
Maryann Maglangit
Maryann Maglangit lives and works in the Philippine’s Queen City of the South, the country’s oldest city since the Spanish regime. She attended the University of San Jose-Recolletos receiving a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and later studied at Southwestern University. She has been writing from the age of three, a passion which continued into her adult life. After college she put aside her interest in writing to climb the corporate ladder as a marketing analyst for an American architectural company. She later became a community service representative for a US based global eCommerce company. The new position gave her plenty of time to write and in 2011 she renewed her passion for writing. Her current project is a lesbian themed novel entitled Poison Ivy. Read.
Donal Mahoney
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press, and Washington University in St. Louis. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, including The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune and Commonweal. You can learn more about Donal and his work at Eye on Life Magazine, to which he invites your visit. Read.
Annette Makino
Annette Makino is a poet and artist who writes haiku and combines her words with Japanese ink paintings. She offers prints, calendars and cards of her work through her art business, Makino Studios. Her haiku and haiga (haiku art) have been published in the leading English-language haiku journals and anthologies, and several of her poems have won awards, including being shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for best haiku of 2013. Makino grew up with a Japanese father and a Swiss mother, and has lived in both Japan and Europe. She is inspired by the untamed beauty of her Pacific Northwest home in Arcata, California, where she lives with her husband, two children and a dog. Read.
Diana Matisz
Diana Matisz is a late-blooming writer and photographer. She was born and raised along the Allegheny River near Pittsburgh, PA. And although she lived away from this environment for many years, the river and its quiet shores have become a constant source of inspiration for both her poetry and her photography. Diana has published one book of poetry, two photography books and is currently in the editing stages of a collaborative book with a colleague in Portugal. During this last summer, three of her photographs were selected for display at the Carnegie Museum of Art. She tweets @Diana605 and has a presence Facebook. Her main poetry site is Diana's Words. At her photography page, Life Through Blue Eyes, Diana has found the means to combine her love of short form poetry with her photography, as well as her joy in collaborating with other writers. "It's an incredible experience when I collaborate on one of my photographs with a group of poets. The range of perspectives is fascinating and beautiful and it makes me view my own art in ways I would never have expected." Read.
Nancy May
Nancy May is a haiku and senryu poet. Her haiku can be found at Haiku Journal, Three Line Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Inclement Poetry, Twisted Dreams Magazine, Vox Poetica, Eskimo Pie, Icebox, Dark Pens, Daily Love, Leaves of Ink, The Blue Hour Magazine, Kernels, Mused – The BellaOnline Literary Review, Danse Macabre – An online literary Magazine, High Coupe, A Handful of Stones, Lyrical Passion Poetry E-Zine, UFO Gigolo, 50 Haikus, The Germ, Boston Literary Review, Be Happy Zone, Every Day Poets, Cattails, Ppigpenn, Creatrix Journal, Dead Snakes, M58, The Camel Saloon, Haikuary, Scarlet Leaf Review, Your One Phone Call, and the Plum Tree Tavern. She has reached the Heron's Nest consideration stage twice and the Chrysanthemum consideration stage once. She has an unpublished senryu collection. She lives in the North West of England and studied English at college. Read.
Gary Maxwell
Gary Maxwell was born in north central Kansas and lived there a grand total of six weeks before hitting the road for a life of wandering with his Air Force family. He started playing the guitar in high school and began writing songs shortly thereafter, but it wasn't until the final semester of a BS degree in Computer Science - 30+ years ago - that he started writing poetry (Shakespearean sonnets, to be precise). Gary divides his time between reading (his first love), writing, and keeping body and soul together as a day laborer on the information superhighway. He maintains an online presence at Fools' Blog, and tweets @yeoldefoole. He currently resides (appropriately) in Reading, Massachusetts - just north of Boston. Read.
Helen McCarthy
Helen McCarthy grew up surrounded by poetry and legends, in a large Irish household was always full of music and stories. She's been writing ever since. Her work in Japanese popular culture since 1981 not only led to a dozen books and a number of awards, but also revived her passion for haiku and tanka. Since 2009 she's been tweeting micropoetry, mostly in the haiku and tanka format, daily. Some of her poetry can also be found on her blog at Wordpress, and in the online anthology Jars of Stars. Helen lives in London, travels as often as she can, and has given haiku readings and workshops in Europe and the USA. Read.
Michelle McGrane
Michelle McGrane lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her most recent poetry collection, The Suitable Girl, is published by Pindrop Press in the United Kingdom and Modjaji Books in South Africa. Michelle blogs at Peony Moon and is a member of SA PEN. She can be found on Twitter. Read.
Dennis McHale
Dennis McHale was born in Jacksonville, Florida and raised in the Blue Ridge mountains in Brevard, North Carolina. He was educated at Appalachian State University and Dominican University of San Rafael, where he received notable reviews and several awards for his writing. His work has been published in the Northern California Perspective, CIAO Magazine (Indiana University’s Journal of Arts and Letters) , Penguin Review (Dominican University), These Human Shores, Something’s Brewing and other magazines and poetry anthologies. He has lectured on poetry at several universities and colleges. He was a recipient of the True Boardman Oratorical Award and a past winner of the Shirley Joseph Memorial Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Magazine Award. His current collection of poems The Winter Bites My Bones: New and Collected Poems, 1980-2013 was named by Poets & Writers magazine as a top five poetry debut of 2013. He is a member of the International Fellowship of Poetry. He currently lives in Venice Beach, California. His second collection of poems, Echoes Across Time will be published and released in September, 2014. Interested readers may visit his online poetry blog at www.dlmchale.com to read some of his current work, as well as selected poems from guest poets. Read.
Joan McNerney
Joan McNerney was born in Brooklyn, New York and now resides in Ravena, a small town outside of Albany, New York. She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the Board of Regents, New York State Excelsior University. Most of her professional background has been spent in the advertising business. Her poetry has been included in numerous literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Blueline, 63 channels, Spectrum, and three Bright Spring Press Anthologies. Four of her books have been published by fine small literary presses. She has recited her work at the National Arts Club, Russell Sage College, McNay Art Institute and other distinguished venues. A recent reading was sponsored by the American Academy of Poetry. She has received three Best of the Net nominations. The internet has expanded her outreach and given her great impetus to continue writing. Read.
Stuart McPherson
Stuart McPherson is a poet and spoken word artist from Leicestershire, UK. His writing explores the survival of everyday life, either through personal experience or through the perseverance of others. Stuart draws inspiration from his over twenty years of involvement in the punk rock scene, and feels similarly that poetry written with honesty, heart and soul is perhaps more important than anything. Stuart also enjoys recording and performing his poems and has been published online and in paper form. You can catch him on twitter @StuMcP and also on his website, where he shares his work. Read.
Bruce McRae
Bruce McRae was born in Ontario, Canada in 1954. During the years 1972 to 1975 he studied television and radio production while playing in a number of bands in the Ontario area. He also has played with different bands in the UK. While on one trip to the UK in 1994, he began performing at poetry readings in London, and had his First poems published three years later. Since then, he has published over 900 poems around the world. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press, 2010), is available on Amazon here. Bruce has been nominated for a Pushcart Award, and you can explore more of his poetry at BruceMcRaePoetry on YouTube. Read.
Ria Meade
Ria Meade is a native Long Islander, living in a harbor community that borders the town where she grew up. She drew and painted from early childhood and earned a Bachelor in Fine Arts in 1977. She was working in New York City in 1982, when juvenile diabetes took her sight completely. Life changed dramatically and artistic passion took a back seat as she learned to deal with her blindness. She credits being saved by the six Labrador Retriever guide dogs she has been paired with over the last thirty years allowing her creativity to return in the form of poetry. Ria has three books: In the Sun, The Visit (chapbooks) and her latest, Someday a Sunrise (Local Gems Press, 2013). She contributes regularly to The Avocet Quarterly Magazine and is also found in their weekly online publication. She has been included in two books: Behind our Eyes and Toward Forgiveness. Her poetry is included in the following Long Island Publications: Nassau County Poet Laureate Anthology, Bards Annual, and in the Performance Poets Association Anniversary Anthology. In 2016, her poems were selected to be included in the Oberon Literary Review, Crosswinds Journal, and Absoloose, a Loose Moose Publication. Read.
Judy Melchiorre
Judy Melchiorre has been writing poetry for three years. She resides in Richmond, Virginia, where she is a member of the River City Poets, James River Writers, and the Poetry Society of Virginia. She regularly attends critique groups and workshops and reads at open mic venues. She has published locally in the Richmond area but VerseWrights is her first online journal publication. Read.
Karla Linn Merrifield
Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had about 600 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 12 books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye, a member of the board of directors of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), a member of the Florida State Poetry Society, and The Author's Guild. She is currently at work on three manuscripts and seeking a home for The Comfort of Commas, a quirky chapbook that pays tribute to punctuation. She publishes a "woefully outdated" blog, Vagabond Poet, to which she invites your visit. Read.
Gary Metras
Gary Metras is the author of Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems, winner of the Split Oak Press Chapbook Award 2010, Francis D'Asissi 2008, Finishing Line Press 2008, selected as Recommended by the Massachusetts Center of the Book 2009, along with thirteen other chapbooks and three books of poems. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Blueline, Boston Review of Books, Connecticut Poetry Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Salzburg Poetry Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, and Small Press Review. His newest book, Captive in the Here, is due this fall from Cervena Barva Press. He is a retired educator having taught English and writing on the high school and college levels. He is the printer and editor of Adastra Press, which specializes in hand crafted limited edition chapbooks. An avid fly fisher, he fishes the rivers and steams of western Massachusetts as often as possible. Read.
J T Milford
J T Milford began writing poetry when he retired as a CPA from public accounting twenty-two years ago. He has lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana most of his life and uses his life there as a background for his poetry. He states that he "really does not write poems; they seem to arrive and demand to be written." He is currently working to complete his first book of poems, many of which express his interest in light, music, nature and emotions. J T won first prize at the Nostalgia Press, an honorable mention at New Millennium Writings, and has also published poems in Lucidity, Avocet, Little Red Tree and Whispers. Read.
Ben Miller
Ben Miller is a poet, writer, and computer programmer who lives in the US Northern Plains. His poetry is ritualistic in nature and has previously appeared on his now retired blog; he has had fiction published in the second Third Eye Blind anthology. He began writing poetry as a teenager, on the suggestion of an English teacher and hasn't stopped since. As a form of expression, his poetry is a mixture of music, logic and storytelling, yet exists somewhere in the spaces between those entities. He is influenced by diverse poets such as Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Baudelaire, and Ferlinghetti. More words are in the works. Read.
Frank C Modica
Frank C Modica is a retired public school special education teacher who grew up on the south side of Chicago, just a mile from Comiskey Park. He now lives in Urbana, Illinois. He taught students on the autism spectrum and with severe medical and education challenges for 34 years. Since his retirement he volunteers with a number of arts and social service organizations in his community. His work has appeared in Black Heart Magazine, The Tishman Review, Crab Fat Literary Magazine, and Pegasus. He tweets @fcmodica53 and invites you to follow him. Read.
Christi Moon
Christi Moon grew up in a small coastal town in California and currently resides in rural southeastern, Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been published in the journal Brush Strokes and Ink Spots, an Anthology of Poetry and Art ~ The River Journal and Twisted Tungz art & literature magazine, and online on Combustus and The River Journal. When not writing poetry, her personal interests also include; photography, yoga, and exploring local nature trails. She also facilitates poetry workshops for cancer survivors and is passionate about advocating and fund raising for local cancer patients. Read.
Sarah Frances Moran
Sarah Frances Moran is a writer, editor, animal lover, videogamer, queer Latina. She thinks Chihuahuas should rule the world and prefers their company to people 90% of the time. Her work has most recently been published or is upcoming Drunk In A Midnight Choir, FreezeRay Poetry, Rust+Moth, Maudlin House and The Bitchin' Kitsch. She is the editor/founder of Yellow Chair Review. She maintains her own website here and invites your visit. Read.
Cord Moreski
Cord Moreski is a poet and teacher from New Jersey. He is the author of the chapbook Stay Afloat Inside (2016, Indigent Press), and he was a nominee for 2016 Poet Laureate of Asbury Park. His work has been featured in Silver Birch Press, The Yellow Chair Review, Eunoia Magazine, Five 2 One Magazine, and several other magazines and journals. When he is not writing, he teaches middle school reading and language arts in special education. Read.
Paul Mortimer
Paul Mortimer was born in North Wales and now lives in Devon, UK. His debut collection, Fault Line, was published in 2016 by Lapwing Press, and was nominated for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Best First Collection. The book also inspired a complete art exhibition with four artists producing more than 40 works based on the poems. The exhibition toured numerous venues throughout 2016. Paul is a regular performer on the South West circuit having headlined at several events including Exeter and Torquay and last November he staged a one-man hour long poetry show at the Taunton Literary Festival. He has also appeared at several other literary festivals and has been signed up for this year’s prestigious Teignmouth Poetry Festival. Read.
Brian Mosher
Brian Mosher has been writing for as long as he can remember, starting with satirical mock-biographies of High School classmates. His music reviews have appeared in Razorcake Magazine, NowWave (now sadly defunct), Askew Reviews, and The Noise: Rock Around Boston. Lately he’s focused on writing poetry and short fiction, which he blogs on his site, Phlubbernatic. He is also at work on an ever-expanding novel-in-progress. His work on VerseWrights represents his first published poetry outside of his own blog. Brian lives in Southeastern Massachusetts, and spends eight hours a day in a cubicle working in the health insurance industry. He makes time to write in the evenings and on weekends. Besides writing, he loves to read and listen to music, and still searches for opportunities to be surprised by life. Read.
R. H. Mustard
R.H. Mustard's first published poem appeared while he was in college. Over a long career in teaching, running his own commercial photography business, and finally working for a large corporation, he continued to write. His first self-published ebook, Blue Moon, came out in 2011. A second book, Found Beauty, is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2014. His work has appeared in Ragazine, a digital magazine, and The Diverse Anthology: Voices in Contemporary Poetry. Mustard's blog, City Noir, is a showcase for new poems and photography, and he invites your visit. Read.