_{Volume 2 Summer/Fall 2026
CONTRIBUTORS}

_{Jason Alfonso is the Service Operations Supervisor for Groman Mortuaries, Inc. He grew up in a broken single-parent home in Koreatown, Los Angeles. At the age of nine, he joined a predominantly Asian gang known as Jefrox abbreviated as JFX. After the brutal murder of his older brother, he evolved to another street gang, predominantly Hispanic, known as DIABLOS, abbreviated as DIA. The manager of the funeral home raised Jason as a son after Jason became an employee and taught him how to be a professional and maintain a career. With a heart full of gratitude and love, Jason was taught to be a real man of honor and live a crime-free life.}

_{Tom Bauer is a poet, photographer, and community leader based in Redondo Beach. With a degree in chemistry, he initially began his career as a research chemist before transitioning to the information technology field. During this time, he discovered a profound love for poetry, utilizing it as an emotional outlet and a way to articulate complex feelings. His poetry skills flourished while attending Linda Neal’s Poetry Workshop, which he currently leads following her passing. In addition to writing, he is an avid photographer and published the collection, Relax and Enjoy, Poems to Ponder. Deeply committed to his community, he currently serves as a Redondo Beach Harbor Commissioner and performs with the local Improv Troupe, April’s Fools.}

_{Darin Black is a seasoned IT professional with over 30 years of experience in the industry. With a strong foundation in technology and systems management, he has spent the past decade specializing in website design, maintenance, and hosting. Darin combines deep technical expertise with a sharp eye for design, delivering reliable, user-friendly web solutions that meet the evolving needs of businesses and clients alike.}

_{Father Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest and founder and director of Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. He is the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles in the heart of gang territory. He holds a B.A. in philosophy and English from Gonzaga University, an M.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree from the Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a Master of Sacred Theology degree from the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, California.  He is the author of several books, including Tattoos on the Heart, Barking to the Choir, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness, and Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times. In 2024, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work. Boyle was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in December 2011, and has received numerous other awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from MALDEF, the 2007 Humanitarian of the Year by Bon Appetit magazine, and the 2016 Humanitarian of the Year by the James Beard Foundation.}

_{James Cagney is a Cave Canem fellow and the award-winning author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) and MARTIAN: The Saint Of Loneliness (Nomadic Press, 2022). His current collection, Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive, is published by Black Lawrence Press. Mr. Cagney won the PEN Oakland 2019 Josephine Miles award and the 2021 James Laughlin award from Academy of American Poets.  He was born, raised, and currently resides in Oakland, California. Visit his website at: JamesCagneyPoet.com.} 

_{Alexis Rhone Fancher is a poet/photographer and is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Spillway, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. Her photos are published worldwide, She has authored thirteen poetry collections, most recently, SINK HOLE, TRIGGERED, (both published by MacQueens) and BRAZEN. (NYQ). Upcoming: Cock Sure, a full-length erotic collection, and A Photo is Worth a Poet’s Words, a collection of photo portraits of over 100 Southern California poets. (Both from Moon Tide Press.) A multi-Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis recently won Best MicroFictions, 2025. She calls the Mojave Desert home.}

_{Debbie Green was a folk singer who had an early influence on Joan Baez, Eric Anderson, Eric Clapton, and others in the 1960s.  She was one of the first folk performers at Club 47 Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before moving to Berkeley, California.  She was born in 1940 in New York City and grew up in Staten Island.  She attended The Putney School, where she was first exposed to music.  In 1958, she began college at Boston University. While a freshman at Boston University, Green taught Joan Baez guitar, and Baez has noted her influence as a teacher.}

_{Richard L. Hasen is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law. He is an internationally recognized expert in election law, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading casebooks in election law and remedies. Hasen served in 2022 and 2024 as an NBC News/MSNBC Election Law Analyst. He was a CNN Election Law Analyst in 2020.}

_{Don Teruo Hata, PhD, was born in East Los Angeles in 1939.  At age three years old, he was arrested with his parents and sent to a concentration camp at Gila, Arizona, pursuant to the round-up of over 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Hata earned his M.A. in Asian Studies and PhD in History at the University of Southern California.  During a year of doctoral research in Japan (1965-1966), He was the katei-kyoshi (tutor in residence) to iconic cinema actor Toshiro Mifune (Rashomon, Seven Samurai) and his family, teaching American English and U.S. history and culture. His PhD dissertation, on nativist, racist, and xenophobic opposition to Japanese immigration to the United States, was later published by the New York Times-Arno Press (1978) as “Undesirables:  Early Immigrants and the Anti-Japanese Movement in San Francisco, 1892-1893.”  He taught history for over 30 years (1970-2003) at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where he was the recipient of the CSUDH Lyle Gibson Distinguished Teaching Award, the CSUDH Outstanding Professor Award, and the CSU Board of Trustees’ System-wide Outstanding Professor Award. He is co-author of the book, Japanese Americans and World War II:  Mass Removal, Imprisonment, and Redress, 4th Edition (2011), and a book of his paintings, entitled Nikkei Gulag:  Japanese American (Nikkei) Political Prisoners and U.S. Concentration Camps in World War II (2024).}

_{Ron Koertge (KUR-chee) posts every Sunday on Substack. Always about Poetry. Ron’s latest book is from Red Hen Press. Here is its intriguing title  —   Pandora’s  Kitchen. You can visit his website at ronkoertge.com}

_{Mariana Lin’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, RHINO, and The Mississippi Review, and as the former writer behind Siri, she has written on creative writing for AI for The Paris Review. She has an MFA from Pacific University.  Her website is www.marianalin.com}

_{Linda Neal was a two-time Pushcart nominee, psychotherapist, writing teacher and thirty-year kidney transplant patient. She holds an MFA from Pacific U. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Chiron Review, Gyroscope Review, Prairie Schooner, Tampa Review and elsewhere. She lived and taught poetry in Redondo Beach, CA. She has published two collections, Dodge & Burn (Bambaz Press, 2014) and Not About Dinosaurs (Bambaz Press, 2020). Linda’s poems reach toward the ecstatic and explore the quotidian. Her chapbooks and first collection, Dodge & Burn, detail experiences of loss and grief. In Not About Dinosaurs, she digs deeper into questions of love, longing, and loss, traveling the arc of life and contemplating matters of death and extinction. Writer, meditator, therapist, teacher, wife, mother, divorcee, widow, dialysis and transplant patient, she is the daughter of an engineer and a pin-up model. She grew up in the South Bay area of LA under the spell of The Wizard of Oz, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and The Bomb. Over the years, she has founded and run several reading series and led writing and meditation workshops. She was editor-at-large for ONTHEBUS, a journal of art and poetry. She held a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Pacific University. Her poems and memoir pieces have been accepted for publication in many journals, including Calyx, Chiron Review, Crosswinds, Lummox, Prairie Schooner and Tampa Review.}

_{Cristina Nehring is a Paris-based writer; her articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, the London Review of Books and others. Her first book, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the 21st Century, was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Her most recent book is The Child Who Never Spoke: 23 1/2 Lessons in Fragility. Find out more about her at www.cristinanehring.net.”}

_{Jon Pearson is a writer, speaker, artist, and educator. He has been a cartoonist for the Oakland Tribune, a classroom teacher, a college professor, and a prayer chaplain. He has written over three hundred short stories, four hundred essays, and three wildly unhinged novels. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and his work has appeared in a slew of journals. He teaches what he calls the ABRACADABRA writing process on zoom. You can find him online at www.jonpearsoncreative.com.} 

 _{Vanessa Poster is a member of the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective and the Poetry Salon, studied Method Writing with Jack Grapes for more than 30 years, and has been teaching expressive writing since 2017. Her work has appeared in Stories from the Muses: Become a Better Writer; Grief Dialogues, The Book; The Thieving Magpie; ONTHEBUS; Fourth & Sycamore; and Went To Ralphs To Get A Chicken. She is a writing coach and runs a workshop called, “The Write Way: Using the Written Word to Heal.” In her workshop, students find support, creative inspiration, and community. She is a graduate of Stanford University with a Bachelor’s in Humanities and a Master’s in Modern Thought and Literature. She was widowed in 2015 and remarried in 2020 to a man who also lost a spouse to cancer. Her poems explore themes of grief, love, and gratitude.}

_{Mike Prysner is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq.  His experiences there led him to become anti-war, and he became executive director of the Center on Conscience and War (CCW).  He co-founded March Forward!, an organization of active-duty members of the U.S. military and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that encourages active-duty service personnel to resist deployment and seek an honorable discharge by being a conscientious objector. In March 2008, he was a member of a panel discussing the topic Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan in Maryland. He spoke about his time in Iraq as a soldier and his personal views about the two wars. He is on the National Board of Directors for Veterans for Peace. After the start of the Iran war in February 2026, Prysner states that the CCW received hundreds of conscientious objector applications from active-duty members of the military—a sharp increase compared to previous years when only about 50 applications were received annually. He is a producer and co-writer for the program The Empire Files, with his wife Abby Martin.}

_{Terrance Steele was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles.  He worked on his father’s ice cream truck at ages 8-9, played Little League baseball, played football, and basketball.  He had a memorabilia collection of baseball, basketball, and football cards.  He is the oldest sibling with three brothers and three sisters.  His grandfather was a sergeant in the U.S. Marines, and his grandmother was an educator.  Terrance enjoyed cooking with his grandmother.  He attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.}

_{Charles Harper Webb was the recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, and had two books published in 2026. His collection Old Gnu won the Longleaf Press Editor’s Choice Award and was published in early 2026, as was a book of prose poems from Moon Tide Press, The Elephant of Surprise.} 

_{Cecilia Woloch is the author of eight collections of poems and a novel. Her honors include grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, CEC/Arts Link International, and a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been translated and published in French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Romanes and Spanish. Born in Pennsylvania and raised there and in rural Kentucky, she’s traveled the world as a teacher and writer. In 2026, she is serving as a Fulbright Fellow at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. When she’s not traveling, she lives in Los Angeles.}