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Writing from the front range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Devon Fulford is the author of the poetry books hopscotch (forthcoming 2027), you can still drown in the shallows (2026), thrum, (2026), onus (2025), gulp (2024), the skin song (2024), and southern atheist: oh, honey (2021). She serves as the faculty director for Literacy Through Prose and Poetry at Colorado State University, where she teaches writing. Devon holds a Doctor of Education and Masters degrees in both creative writing and education; her research interests include experiential learning and positive psychology in pedagogical content.
Adam Galanski-De León is the author of the story collection Bastards in Oxblood, available through Roadside Press. His work has been featured in various journals and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times. Adam lives in Chicago, with his wife and children. He maintains a website at http://www.adamjgalanskideleon.com.
Raised in the river valleys and open fields of central Illinois, James Griffin has roamed and rambled from coast to coast and beyond. A punk rock poseur, and armchair anarchist, reaching for the roof he has landed here.
Photo by Richard Vargas
Westley Heine is the author of Busking Blues: Recollections of a Street Musician and Squatter (Roadside Press 2022), a short story collection 12 Chicago Cabbies (Newington Blue Press 2021), a poetry collection Street Corner Spirits (Roadside Press 2023), and a collection of short stories and poems Cloud Watching in the Inferno (Roadside Press 2025). Most recently Roadside Press has acquired his new novel The Boys in Black (2026).
Heine was a 2025 poetry judge for the Society of Midland Authors, is Pushcart Prize nominated, twice the featured performer at the original poetry slam at The Green Mill in Chicago, featured at Underground Lit Fest in Toledo and Beyond Baroque in LA, and was the poet chosen to represent Illinois at the Route 66 Poetry & Arts Festival 2025. Instagram: @westleyheine
Lori Jakiela is the author of nine books, most recently The Things You Can’t Remember Become the Things You Can’t Forget (Roadside 2026). Her work has been widely published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, Pittsburgh Magazine, Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Chicago Tribune and more. Her awards include The Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, The City of Asylum-Pittsburgh Prize, The Wicked Woman Prize from Brickhouse Books, and more. She lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania, and teaches writing at The University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg and The Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her author website is http://lorijakiela.net.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and the author of seven books, most recently, CEMETERY KIDS out in 2027 from Roadside Press. You can find more of his writing at https://lenkuntz.blogspot.com
Michele McDannold has organized poetry events and/or performed poetry with a bunch of unabashed free-thinkers across this great United States, most happily by roadtrip but sometimes by plane, train or coincidence. She spends most of her time producing and publishing books when she’s not out killing miles with her magical jeep. Michele recently released a twenty-year collection, Collected Poems 2005-2025. Michele is the publisher behind Roadside Press and the founder of The Literary Underground.
Dave Newman, a recent Pushcart Prize winner for fiction, is the author of 11 books, including the novel Dope and Vodka and Cigarettes, and Not Shaving Her Legs (Roadside, 2026) and the collection Better Than The Best American Poetry (Roadside, 2025). He won the Rattle Readers’ Choice award in 2024. His collection The Slaughterhouse Poems (White Gorilla Press, 2013) was named one of the best books of the year by L Magazine. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in magazines and journals around the world, including Ambit (U.K.), Tears In The Fence (U.K.), Gulf Stream, Belt, literary underground, and the legendary Nerve Cowboy. He appeared in the PBS documentary narrated by Rick Sebak about Pittsburgh writers. Winner of numerous awards, including the Andre Dubus Novella Prize, he lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela. After a decade of working in medical research, he currently teaches in the Creative and Professional Writing Program at The University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, his alma mater.
William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Hobart, Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award, and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). His latest poetry collection, The People Are Like Wolves to Me, is available from Roadside Press.
