Contributors’ Notes
Dale is the author of the poetry book
Dynamite, Backwood Bougie Press. His poems
have appeared on highway high-rise billboards,
on the back of warm milk cartons
clamped in the palms of young men
who think Haiku is an Asian dance,
and it doesn't include where he teaches
overrun with institutional debt --
what all writers must earn as rite of passage. His
class is multicultural; a couple of Jews
and a lesbian -- not sure if she's one of those pansexuals
because she had other things to do
that Saturday night he asked her out,
then on a Monday because nothing ever
happens on any Monday but morning.
As recipient of Old Hickory Fellowship, Dale's
been traveling, been to Italy, Rome, lectured about it
in his beginning statements at seminars,
but has never been to the places he writes about,
or outside of them. He lives closer to fear,
is known to lock his Audi when someone
far from his ethnicity walks by. Of course
he's not racist, just
cautious after learning about race riots
in low-income communities, specifically
every urban city after Floyd's... Receiving his MFA degree
at an Ivy league college
was probably not his biggest accomplishment
in his life.
Grace, Professor of Fine Art,
a former finalist of the Guggenheim fellowship,
has been on PBS voicing topics
about mass incarceration. Her lips purse
when questioned about prison writers
to which she follows: a writer is a writer
like white and black is red inside,
or hot is hot and cold is the hand
of a mother's touch after losing her son
to police brutality.
And the rest of the panel swiveled
in their comfortable chairs, adjusting a follow up.
She's currently beautiful—always. Her poems
published abroad, in small presses,
across prison brick walls that hold
a thematic purpose.
You can find her in routine trips
to detention centers, to hear poems unchained
by speakers gridlocked in shuffle,
a song caught in mid-throat.
Demetrius is a poet, essayist, an author
of self-clairvoyance and knows the sad song
caught in mid-throat. He removed his old
voice box, replaced it with CL20s tweaked.
He's an award winner
of a 30-year bid, a finalist for revenge,
and though he rarely appears in any magazine
he's always there somewhere
finding digging. He doesn't
have an MFA or any academic credentials.
No high school diplomas
or excuse for a glamorous life
of flagging down poems to sell poems
to poems. Most times his work
casts shadows to where journals reject
out of sheer unknowing
of a beating sent in the brown envelope.
In 2020 his Pushcart Prize
was full of dirty laundry, contraband before pass.
Nominees were for a class 3 citation ticket
and an empty stomach at count time.
A Pulitzer for the most
prestigious honor on jailing because it's an art form
no one mastered yet under a creed
of his carrying.
You can find Meech
in these words, out by the lake in a Max prison
contemplating his next trip to the hole.