Roberta Batorsky is a poet, science journalist and college educator. She is in several online and in-person poetry and fiction writing critique groups and has put a poetry book together called Perihelion, published last November by Prolific Pulse Press. Her poetry is published in Fine-Lines, Delaware Valley Poets Worksheets, Poets for Science, Prolific Pulse Press poetry compilations (Social Possibilities and Unhoused), NJ Bards, NewVerseNews, Quillkeepers Press, Pure Slush and Heron Clan and she has been a freelance editor/reviewer of Life Sciences textbooks. She co-edits the Heron Clan poetry publication.She writes on topics as varied as her interests and currently teaches Biology at a NJ youth corrections facility.Find her on Instagram at RobertaBatorsky_poetry

The Present Poetry Podcast is going on hiatus! Submissions are still open through the form, and we'll be back September 7th!

Adair Heitmann, BFA, is an award-winning poet, storyteller, educator, and artist. Her poems are published in We are Here; Lost Love by Orenaug Mountain Publishing; Connecticut Bards Poetry Review 2025; and the Fourth Volume of Connecticut Poets. Her personal narrative essays are published in Animals: Personal Encounters with Spirit Animals and Clarity: Stories About the Moment That Changed it All. Heitmann is Poet-in-Residence in under-resourced schools and teaches creative writing in colleges. A professional storyteller, she performs inspiring true stories with universal messages to adult audiences. Her artwork is exhibited widely. She is a graduate of Syracuse University. She lives in Connecticut, US. You can connect with her through her website at adairheitmann.com."Land of my Home" was published in "We Are Here" by Orenaug Mountain Publishing, 2024."Creation Pilgrimage" was published in "Connecticut Bards Poetry Review 2025"."Soaked in Love" was published in "Pleasant Pastimes: Poems About the Sports We Love" by Orenaug Mountain Publishing, 2026.

Enas Rashid is a contemporary artist from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She is a multidisciplinary who grew up with a passion for all forms of art and enjoys illustration, painting, creative writing and sculpting. She believes in expressing the deepest emotions in various surreal ways that transcend form by blending reality and imagination together to create a new way to communicate and connect to people across all cultures.

Zaha Al-Hmoud is a Jordanian-Canadian poet based in Canada. Born in Jordan, he moved to Canada at six years old. His first collection, The Ache Is What Moves Me, traces the arc of a psychiatric break and the rebuilding that followed, through running marathons, through writing, through refusing to let the clinical world own the language of what happened. The poems are grounded in the body, in sky and soil and hands. He writes because he needs a crutch, a lifeline of some sort.

Loralee Clark has a fourth chapbook forthcoming: Neolithic Imaginings: Mythical Explorations of the Unknown (Kelsay Press, 2026). Clark has been nominated for three 2026 Pushcart Prizes. She resides in Virginia; her website is sites.google.com/view/loraleeclark. Her Substack, which focuses on the process of creativity, is nosuchthingasfailure.substack.com.Her poems Artistry, The Path: Ways to Help a Creative, and Capitalism Says were all nominated for the 2026 Pushcart Prize.

Clint Frakes is a poet, writer, teacher, and ceremonialist living in Sedona, AZ and the Verde Valley since 1992. His poetry, prose and narrative non-fiction has appeared in nearly 200 journals, magazines and anthologies in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Argentina since 1987. He was named one of the Best New Poets of 2008 by former American Poet Laureate, Mark Strand, and received the Josephine Darner Distinguished Poet Prize. Other awards include the James Vaughan Poetry Prize, The Pudding House Chapbook Prize and the Peggy Ferris Memorial Prize for Poetry.He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. He received his MA at the Northern Arizona University creative writing program, and received his Phd with emphasis in creative writing from the University of Hawaii.His Publication include: Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water (Seven Worlds Press, 2025), The Aching Unrest of Spheres (Finishing Line, 2024), and Mystery not Always Unkind (Pudding House Press, 2008).He is the former Chief Editor of The Hawaii Review, and the Founder of Seven Worlds Press. Clint lives in Cornville, AZ with his sons, Quanah and Dawson.

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over 600 stories and poems published so far, and twelve books. He works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he squats on the review board, and at Scribes Micro, where he’s the idle figurehead.His book, Peculiar Perspectives, will be published in May 2026 by Prolific Pulse Press

Lindsay Soberano Wilson is a mother, teacher, and author. "The Japanese Red Maple" from Hoods of Motherhood: A Collection of Poems (Prolific Pulse Press, 2023), a bittersweet reflection on motherhood, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her second poetry book, Breaking Up with the Cobalt Blues: Poems for Healing (Prolific Pulse Press, 2024), curating artistry from pain, was featured on CBC Radio One's Ontario Morning and CBC Books to Read. She is a contributing writer to the anthologies Cadence: Life's Poetic Rhythms (2024) and Social Possibilities: Poetic Voices of Hope (2025), which were Finalists in the American Writing Awards. Casa de mi Corazón: A Travel Journal of Poetry and Memoir (Poetica Publishing, 2021) explores how her Canadian Jewish identity was shaped by travel to Israel, Morocco, and Europe. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in Canada, the USA, Australia, the UK, India, and France, in publications like Jewish Women of Words, Silver Birch Press, Spill Words Press, Poetry Super Highway, Fine Lines Literary Journal, and Fevers of the Mind.​ She holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Toronto, and an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. She is writing about being a third-generation Holocaust Survivor in "Be A Somebody: A 3G Memoir." Her essay "Bubby Was Right" was featured in Zibby's On Being Jewish Now.

Maria Tosti was born in 1965 in Perugia, Italy, and lives in a small Umbrian town crossed by the river Tiber. She writes poems since she was a teenager. She participated at several national and international poetry awards along the years, getting many appreciations. Her poetry is a path of reflections and considerations on the human existence and the life experiences. Creating is a breath of art for her, and setting the emotions on the paper is to give voice to the inspiration that comes from inside with insistence. She is convinced that Poetry doesn’t belong only to the intellectuals, but it belongs to everybody because it is a universal message destined to touch the strings of the sensitivity of each individual, permeating the nuances of his feeling.She likes writing poetry in other languages too, such as English, Spanish and French. She is also passionate about short poems, in the Japanese style, such as haiku, senryu, tanka. One of her haiku was set to music by master Paolo Scatena.Her literary debut was with the multilingual poetry book "Voci ai confini dell’anima” – “Voices to the Boundaries of the Soul” - published by Thoth Editions/Mario Vallone in the year 2014 both in paper and eBook format. The book includes poems in Italian, English, French and Spanish.Her artistic works also include visual poems, like Hagia and Shahai, thanks to her passion for Photography and Drawing.Many of her literary and artistic works have appeared in various national and international literary journals, magazines, blogs, websites and anthologies around the world.She has also written the text of some songs in Italian, looking for a new way of expression and a new artistic technique. Two of her texts have been set to music, one by the Italian composer Pasqualino Moscatelli, and the other by the master Daniel Cianelli.For more info, please check out her Website.