This week our guest is Yuki Jackson. Yuki is a Black and Japanese poet and educator. Her poetry has been published in literary journals such as Four Way Review and Cream City Review, for which she was nominated for a 2021 Best of the Net Award and the 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. Yuki is a regular contributor for the "Poet's Notebook" column of Creative Loafing Tampa Bay and her work has been featured by NPR Next Gen, Spady Cultural Heritage Museum and the Goodwin-Procter law firm. She was also featured as a playwright for The Straz Center’s BIPOC Play-Reading Series, showcasing her cross-cultural writing through an interdisciplinary and collaborative performance. For more, her website is YukiJackson.com.

This week our guest is Lenore Myka. Lenore is the author of a prize-winning short story collection and the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in American Scholar, The Normal School, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, Quartz, New England Review, Five Points, and others. Her work can be found at lenoremyka.com

This week our guest is Curtis Davis. Curtis was born and raised in Tampa, FL. He has been writing and performing poetry since a youth in high school and has since traveled all over the states competing in international, national, and regional poetry slam competitions. In 2018 he was ranked the 8th poet in the world after becoming a finalist in the Individual World Poetry Slam held in San Diego, CA. He is the Creative Director of the Non-Profit, Heard ‘Em Say Youth Arts Collective and Curtis is the Co-Founder of GrowHouse, an artist collective dedicated to growing community, growing culture, and growing creatives through poetry and hip-hop. He can be found at www.growhousetampa.com

This week our guest is Alia Luria. Alia holds an MFA in Fiction from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She writes a mix of science fiction fantasy novels, personal essays, and haiku. Her first novel, Compendium, won the Indie Excellence Award in fantasy, was a silver medalist in the Reader’s Favorite Book Awards in fantasy, was a gold medalist in the eLit Awards for science fiction/fantasy, and was an Independent Author Network Book of the Year finalist in the science fiction, fantasy, and first novel categories. Her personal essay about being stalked by an ex-boyfriend, “You Might Eat Organic, but You’re Full of Baloney,” was a finalist for the Open Season Award in CNF and was published by Northwest Review.  She has also had short work published in Toho Journal and Wingless Dreamer. Her second novel, Ocularum, is forthcoming in 2024 with Something Or Other Publishing, and her first collection of personal essays and haiku, working title Geri o Shimasu, will be published in 2025 by Unsolicited Press. You can visit her blog at Still Not a Robot stillnotarobot.com or her author site at alialuria.com.

This week our guest is Barbara Riddle. Born and raised in New York, Barbara Riddle now lives and writes in two places: downtown St. Petersburg, Florida,  and in rural Maine in the town of Millinocket.  Barbara has worked as a dog-walker, artist’s model and biochemist but prefers writing fiction above all. In 2020-21  she served as Guest Fiction Editor of the journal Please See Me, devoted to improving communication between health care providers and patients through fiction, poetry and nonfiction narratives. Her writing has appeared in many small publications, including AMBIT (London), kayak (Santa Cruz), Fiction International (San Diego), and WestView News (New York). She writes a column for Atticus Review. A graphic memoir about her bohemian Greenwich Village girlhood, Lovers and Latchkeys, is in progress. Her coming-of-age novel The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke was named one of the Best Indie Debut Novels of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. Her work can be found at barbarariddle.com

This week our guest is Brian Petkash. Brian grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, a focal point of much of his writing (and much of his sports heartache). A former high school literature and creative writing teacher, he lives in Tampa with his partner Celeste and works as a marketing professional in both the game and comic book industries. Brian holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Tampa. His work has appeared in El Portal, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Southword, and Midwestern Gothic. Mistakes by the Lake, his collection of stories published by Madville Publishing, is out now. His work can be found at https://brianpetkash.com/

This week our guest is Heather Lang-Cassera. Heather is a a full-time lecturer with Nevada State University, a Tolsun Books publisher, a Black Fox Literary Magazine poetry editor, and a Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate Emeritus. She was a 2022 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellow. She is the author of Gathering Broken Light (Unsolicited Press, 2021), which was written with the support of a Nevada Arts Council grant and won the NYC Big Book Award in Poetry, Social/Political. Her collection of ecopoems, Firefall, is forthcoming with Unsolicited Press in 2025. Her poetry is widely published including in Lumina, North American Review, Raleigh Review, and South Dakota Review, and etched into sidewalks as permanent installations by both the City of Las Vegas and Clark County, Nevada. Her work can be found at www.heatherlang.cassera.net

This week our guest is Silk Jazmyne. Silk Jazmyne is a student of life who loves narrative in all its forms and the artistically strange. Speculative fiction writer, teaching artist for Kitchen Table Literary Arts, Grubstreet Writers, and The Porch.

She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa. Her work has appeared in Midnight & Indigo, African Writer Magazine, Ekphrastic Exhibition in Tandem: Back | Forth. Her writing can be found at https://silkjazmynewrites.squarespace.com/

This week our guest is Gianna Russo. Gianna is the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa, appointed by Mayor Jane Castor in 2019. She recently wrote “Glorious,” a poem for the Mayor’s second inauguration, and read it at the event in May, 2023.  

Russo is the author of the poetry collections, All I See is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic, with photographer Jenny Carey (Madville Publishing, 2022); One House Down (Madville Publishing, 2019); and Moonflower, winner of a Florida Book Award.  She has published poems in Green Mountains Review, Gulf Stream, Negative Capability, Crab Orchard Review, Apalachee Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, saw palm, The MacGuffin, Florida Review, Tampa Review, Ekphrasis, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, and Calyx, among others. 

She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University and founding editor of YellowJacket Press, which published chapbooks by over 40 Florida poets from 2006-21. A third-generation Tampa native, a mother and grandmother, Gianna lives in an almost 100-year old bungalow with her husband Jeff Karon and their cat Gingko. Her work can be found at www.russo15.wordpress.com

This week our guest is Mark Haber. Mark was born in Washington DC and grew up in Florida. He is the author of the 2008 story collection DEATHBED CONVERSIONS. His first novel, REINHARDT'S GARDEN, was published by Coffee House Press and nominated for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel. His second novel, SAINT SEBASTIAN'S ABYSS (2022), was also published by Coffee House Press and called a "sparkling comic novel" by The New York Times, as well as being named a best book of fiction 2022 by the New York Public Library, LitHub and Southwest Review. Mark's third novel, LESSER RUINS, will be published by Coffee House Press in fall of next year. Mark's fiction has appeared in Guernica, the Southwest Review, LitHub, and AIR/LIGHT. Mark currently lives in Minneapolis. His work can be found at www.mark-haber.com

This week our guest is Sara Ries Dziekonski. Sara holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first book, Come In, We're Open, which she wrote about growing up in her parents' diner, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels on the Living Room Floor (Finishing Line Press 2018) and Marrying Maracuyá (Main Street Rag 2021), which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Slipstream, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Cordella Magazine, 2River View, Earth’s Daughters, Thimble Literary Magazine, Waterwheel Review, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, among others. She is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing Services and teaches creative writing with Keep St. Pete Lit. Her work can be found at: www.sararies.com

This week our guest is Nicole Caron. Nicole’s nonfiction has appeared in numerous trade publications and regional and literary magazines; she works with novelists and memoirists as a developmental and copy editor; and her freelance copywriting has won two regional American Advertising Federation Silver Addy Awards. Nicole lives in St. Petersburg and teaches at Ringling College Of Art + Design, where she runs the First-Year Writing Program.  Nicole spent her Spring 2019 sabbatical conducting research on the history of St. Petersburg, Florida's founding and early years (1888-1920) for the multi-generational family saga she has been working on for the past several years. Her work can be found at nicolecaron.com