2023 Poets
More poets and their information will be added as we get closer to the festival.
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Dimitri Reyes is a Boricua multidisciplinary artist, content creator, and educator from Newark, New Jersey. Dimitri's most recent book, Papi Pichón (Get Fresh Books, 2023) was a finalist for the Omnidawn chapbook contest and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. His other books include Every First & Fifteenth, the winner of the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Award, and the poetry journal Shadow Work for Poets, now available on Amazon. Dimitri's work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and you can find more of his writing in Poem-a-Day, Vinyl, Kweli, & Acentos.
In 2023, he was a part of the inaugural poetry cohort for the Poets & Writers Get The Word Out publishing incubator. Dimitri is also the Marketing & Communications Director at CavanKerry Press.
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Cole Eubanks of Mays Landing, NJ is retired as an educator from the Philadelphia (PA) and Atlantic City (NJ) School Districts. He has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and his work can be found in: Sugar House Review, Peter Murphy Publishing of Stockton University, Apiary, The Journal of Baha’i Studies, F(r)iction, Shamrock, Akitsu, MiGoZine, Black Fire This Time, and other journals and anthologies.
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Shawn R. Jones was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Womb Rain (2008) and A Hole to Breathe (2015). Her work has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Cider Review, Passengers Journal, Rattle, Essence, and elsewhere. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and her poetry collection, Date of Birth, has won the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. She is also a 2023 Civitella Fellow.
Shawn is the co-owner of Tailored Tutoring LLC and Kumbaya Academy, Inc., a dance instructor at Halliday Dance, and a member of the Langston Hughes Society and the poetry performance troupe, No River Twice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden. When she is not writing, dancing, or teaching, she enjoys spending time with her family and her lucky pit bull, Ross.
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Maltese-American poet, Suzanne Gili Post, grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and started writing poetry at an early age. She has been active in the New Jersey “Poets of the Palisades” poetry circle since its beginning in the early 2000s. She is a cultural activist, spending over 40 years working nine-to-five. Other jobs along the way include yoga and meditation trainer, skip tracer, fashion model, lunch lady, nursery schoolteacher, recording artist, discussion leader, cook, trip leader, celebrity handler, costume mistress, photographer, art gallery curator, floral arranger, calligrapher, personal shopper, lion tamer and shoe salesperson. After retirement, her intention is to launch gozotemples.com, providing end-of-life planning and customized ritual celebrations for girls and women. Suzanne lives in Haddonfield, NJ with her partner, Shai, and their companion cat, Mr. Charlie.
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Rachel Bunting is a writer and artist rooted in the wilds of Southern New Jersey. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, selected for inclusion in Best of the Net and Best of the Web anthologies, and can be found in print and online journals including Boxcar Poetry Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Linebreak, The Nervous Breakdown, and [PANK]. Her poetry chapbook, Ripe Again, was released by Finishing Line Press in March 2008, and in December 2009 she created a limited-edition, hand-crafted chapbook of poems, Imprimatur.
Rachel’s essays can be found in Entropy Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, and Wordgathering: a Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, and her visual art has been included in exhibitions at The Dime – Art and Maker Studios and the Medford Arts Center.
Rachel received a 2022 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
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Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which won the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, About Place, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Liza grew up in New Jersey and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She teaches English as a Second Language in New Jersey public schools.
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John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen, New Jersey.” Currently, he teaches social work at Stockton University and is the author of Roadside Attractions: a Poetic Guide to American Oddities.
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Bruce W. Niedt is a retired “beneficent bureaucrat” whose poetry has been published in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Writer’s Digest, Mason Street Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Tiferet, Spitball, and Your Daily Poem. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Best of the Barefoot Muse, Poem Your Heart Out, and Poetry for Ukraine. He has won poetry awards from Writer’s Digest, ByLine Magazine, and the Philadelphia Writers Conference, as well as three Pushcart Prize nominations and two Best of the Net nominations. His first full-length poetry collection, The Bungalow of Colorful Aging (Kelsay Books), and his eighth chapbook, Knit Our Broken Bones (Maverick Duck Press), were released in 2022. He lives with his incredibly patient wife in Cherry Hill, NJ.
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Malik Abduh is a poet & essayist. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden, where he received the 2008 Rutgers University Alumni Association Creative Writing Award. He teaches English at Rowan College at Burlington County & is the editor of the college’s journal, The Baron Anthology. His work appears in several journals & magazines including Southern Indiana Review, Four Way Review, Exit 7, Slush, & Some Call it Ballin’ Magazine. His debut collection, All the Stars Aflame, is forthcoming with Get Fresh Books Publishing.
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BJ Ward is the author of Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990-2013, which received the Paterson Poetry Prize. His other books are Gravedigger’s Birthday , 17 Love Poems with No Despair, and Landing in New Jersey with Soft Hands. All are published by North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, CA) and distributed by Random House.
Ward’s poetry has been featured in multiple publications and websites. One of his poems (“For the Children of the World Trade Center Victims”) has been cast in bronze and acquired as part of the permanent collection at Grounds for Sculpture, an outdoor sculpture museum in Hamilton, New Jersey.
Ward is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for Poetry and two Distinguished Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. The Star-Ledger has named Ward one of the “10 Dynamic Jersey Artists Not Named Springsteen” who are “making a difference,” citing his poetry’s “music and physicality.”
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Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York where he managed a night club, operated heavy equipment, and drove a taxi. He has been awarded six creative writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, which might be a record, as well as multiple residencies at Yaddo, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony and other artist retreats. He has published eleven books and chapbooks of nonfiction and poetry with micro presses around the country. Peter’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals, anthologies and textbooks. For more than forty years Peter has led hundreds of workshops for thousands of writers and teachers in the United States and abroad. Peter founded Murphy Writing Seminars to help writers develop their craft. These are currently offered through Stockton University.
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Patrick Rosal is author of five full-length poetry collections including The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, which was listed among the best books of 2021 by The Boston Globe, in addition to winning the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Research Scholar program, and the Civitella Ranieri Residency. His writing and visual work has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, e-flux, Best American Poetry and many other journals and magazines.
He has taught at various universities and has held many community workshops around the country. He is the Co-Director of Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden, where he is a Professor of English.
He heads the Quilting Water Initiative, an ongoing public art experiment at the intersections of race and ecology which gathers stories of water from around the world and which will culminate in collaborations with local South Jersey artists.
A winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, he has performed as poet and musician in Europe, Africa, Asia, and throughout the Americas at venues that include Lincoln Center, NJPAC, the Cabrillo housing projects for agricultural workers, and Filipino Community Hall in Delano— comprising a writing and performance career spanning more than twenty years and reaching audiences around the world.
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Anna M. Evans has received Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her collection, Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic, is available from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans, is available from White Violet Press.
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Elinor Mattern teaches creative writing, with a focus on poetry, after retiring from teaching English and ESL full-time at Atlantic Cape Community College in Mays Landing, NJ. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and was the recipient of the Director's Award in Poetry. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in fifty journals and newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Washington Square, Paterson Literary Review, Tiferet, and Orison.
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Reet Starwind is a writer, spoken word poet, and graphic artist who willfully follows inspiration in whatever form it takes. When delving into poetry, he trusts the twists and turns of multi-layered rhyme schemes to breathe life into thoughts and feelings. Reet is also working on an anime series called Dreamers’ Playlist and is the creative director at Watu Moja, a nonprofit in Camden, NJ that builds connection between black and brown communities.