Paul Agostino is an American poet whose work has appeared for decades in the independent literary press, including Chiron Review and The Wormwood Review. He was among the many poets associated with the vigorous small-press community of the late twentieth century, publishing alongside writers such as Charles Bukowski, Gerald Locklin, and Ronald Baatz. His poetry is direct, personal, and grounded in the accessible aesthetic that has long characterized the American alternative press.
Sherman Alexie, born in 1966 and raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, is a poet, novelist, story writer and filmmaker. His early poems appeared in Chiron Review and other small magazines before The Business of Fancydancing (1992) and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) made his name; Reservation Blues, the film Smoke Signals and the National Book Award–winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian followed. His poem “James Dean” was issued as a Putzina Press broadside for Chiron Review in 2015.
Antler is an American poet associated with the Beat, environmental, and countercultural traditions. His book Factory, inspired by his experience working in an automobile factory, established him as a distinctive working-class voice. His collection Wild Gratitude received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. A former Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, Antler writes passionately about wilderness, sexuality, spirituality, industrial society, and the struggle to live freely and authentically.
Brenton Booth is an Australian poet and writer based in Sydney whose work has appeared extensively in journals in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. His books include Punching the Teeth from the Sky and Bash the Keys Until They Scream. His poetry combines dark humor, working-class observation, personal experience, and the influence of the American underground tradition. He is also the editor and publisher of the independent literary magazine The Asylum Floor.
Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) was born in Tacoma, Washington, and made his way to San Francisco in the mid-1950s, where he read with the Beats and became, a decade later, one of the emblematic writers of the counterculture. Trout Fishing in America (1967) sold in the millions; In Watermelon Sugar, The Abortion and the poems of The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster followed. His deadpan, whimsical sentences and small, sad, funny poems were widely imitated and never quite matched. He died in Bolinas, California, in 1984. Anthony Lucero’s documentary Here Is Something Beautiful (Etc.) is about his life and legacy.
James Broughton (1913–1999) was a poet and experimental filmmaker, one of the founders of the San Francisco Renaissance and a gleeful elder of the Beats. His films, from Mother’s Day (1948) to The Pleasure Garden, which won a prize at Cannes, and Devotions, made with his partner Joel Singer, are landmarks of the American avant-garde; his many books of poems include A Long Undressing, Ecstasies and Packing Up for Paradise. His motto, “Follow your own weird,” served him for eighty-five years.
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, the city that became the ground of nearly everything he wrote. After decades of odd jobs and a long stint at the post office, he was published steadily by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press, producing dozens of collections of poems and stories and the novels Post Office, Women and Ham on Rye. His plain, unsparing poems about drink, work, women and the racetrack made him the most widely read poet to come out of the American small press, and his appearances in Chiron Review belong to the magazine’s early years.
Harry Calhoun (1953–2015) was an American poet, essayist, reviewer, editor, and longtime participant in the independent literary press. His books include I Knew Bukowski Like You Knew a Rare Leaf, The Black Dog and the Road, and Near Daybreak. His poems appeared in Chiron Review and numerous other journals. Earlier in his career, Calhoun edited the literary magazine Pig in a Poke, helping create another outlet for writers working beyond the literary mainstream.
Alan Catlin is an American poet and fiction writer who has published prolifically in the small press since the 1970s. A longtime bartender in Schenectady, New York, he has drawn extensively upon barroom life, working-class culture, film, painting, literature, and the sometimes surreal encounters of everyday life. The author of numerous books and chapbooks, Catlin has appeared in hundreds of literary publications and has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations during his long writing career.
David Chorlton is a poet and fiction writer whose work reflects his European background and his longtime home in the American Southwest. Born in Austria and raised in England, he eventually settled in Arizona. His numerous collections include The Flying Desert, Speech Scroll, Bird on a Wire, and A Field Guide to Fire. His poetry frequently engages desert landscapes, birds and wildlife, art, music, history, migration, environmental destruction, and the complicated relationship between human beings and the natural world.
Leonard Cirino (1943–2012) was a prolific American poet, editor, and publisher whose many books include The Widow Poems, American Minotaur, The Terrible Wilderness of Self, and 96 Sonnets Facing Conviction. He founded Pygmy Forest Press and spent decades publishing and encouraging other independent writers. Cirino’s own work ranged widely through love, mortality, illness, landscape, spirituality, and the difficulties of being human. His literary papers are preserved in Mendocino County, California.
Joan Colby (1939–2020) was an exceptionally prolific American poet whose work appeared in thousands of literary publications. She published more than twenty books, including The Atrocity Book, Dead Horses, Selected Poems, Ribcage, and The Salt Widow. Her honors included Illinois Arts Council awards and the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Colby wrote with clarity and unsentimental intensity about family, animals, rural life, sexuality, aging, violence, memory, and the sometimes uneasy coexistence of tenderness and cruelty.
Wanda Coleman (1946–2013), often called the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, grew up in Watts and wrote about the city with a ferocity and music all her own. Her books, most of them from Black Sparrow Press, include Bathwater Wine, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Mercurochrome, a finalist for the National Book Award. She also wrote fiction and journalism and was a commanding performer of her work. For Chiron Review Press she edited Earthbound in Betty Grable’s Shoes, the posthumous collection of Susannah Foster.
Robert Cooperman is an American poet based in Colorado and the author of numerous collections, many of them using narrative and dramatic monologue to explore historical figures and events. His books include In the Household of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Petitions for Immortality: Scenes from the Life of John Keats, and In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, which received a Colorado Book Award. Cooperman’s poetry combines storytelling, historical imagination, humor, sympathy, and an abiding interest in complicated human lives.
Judson Crews (1917–2010), born in Waco, Texas, spent most of his life in Taos, New Mexico, where he ran the Motive Press and a series of little magazines including Suck-Egg Mule and The Deer and Dachshund. A friend of Henry Miller and a correspondent of nearly everyone in the post-war small press, he published thousands of short, plain-spoken poems over seven decades, gathered in part in The Clock of Moss and The Noose: A Retrospective. He was one of the true independents of American poetry.
Carl Miller Daniels is an American poet whose prolific work occupies the irreverent, funny, erotic, and sometimes outrageous territory of the independent literary press. His books include String Bean, Saline, Gorilla Architecture, Shy Boys at Home, and Riot Act. The latter two were published by Chiron Review Press. Daniels has been a longtime contributor to Chiron Review, where his unmistakably individual poems and prose have helped embody the magazine’s longstanding openness to unconventional voices.
Sarah Daugherty is an American poet, editor, teacher, and longtime member of the Chiron Review editorial staff. She guest-edited the journal’s special punk-rock issue before becoming a continuing editor and contributor. Her first poetry collection, And Now This, was published by Finishing Line Press. Music, travel, nature, relationships, and memory inform her work, as does her early involvement in punk communities in Washington, D.C., and California. Her poetry combines lyricism with an independent, questioning sensibility.
Henry Denander is a Swedish poet, writer, and watercolor artist whose work has circulated widely through the international small press. His books include I Know What She Will Say, Weeks Like This, The Loulaki Bar, and The Accidental Navigator: New and Selected Poems. His paintings frequently portray writers and musicians, and his book POETraits brings those visual and literary interests together. Denander’s understated poems often find humor, tenderness, melancholy, and surprise in ordinary encounters and daily life.
Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, born in 1954 in North Carolina, was known as “the naked poet” for the readings he gave in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. He is the author of Notes from a Marriage, Waiting for the Virgin and the memoir In the Flesh: Undressing for Success, and edited the anthology A Day for a Lay: A Century of Gay Poetry. He now lives in the mountains of western North Carolina.
John Dorsey is a prolific American poet, editor, journalist, and screenwriter who has been a major presence in grassroots American poetry since the 1990s. The author of scores of poetry collections and chapbooks, his books include Appalachian Frankenstein and Tombstone Factory. A former Poet Laureate of Belle, Missouri, he received the Terry Award for Poetry in 2019. Dorsey’s work is known for its empathy toward outsiders, narrative economy, dark humor, restlessness, and affection for overlooked American lives and places.
W.D. Ehrhart is an American poet, essayist, memoirist, teacher, and Vietnam veteran widely regarded as an important literary voice to emerge from that war. A former U.S. Marine who served thirteen months in Vietnam, he is the author of numerous poetry collections and the acclaimed memoir Vietnam-Perkasie. Although war and its consequences are central to his reputation, Ehrhart’s work also encompasses family, friendship, nature, education, politics, aging, and the moral complexities of ordinary American life.
Barbara Eknoian is an American poet and novelist whose writing frequently draws upon family history, immigration, memory, faith, marriage, and everyday domestic experience. A longtime participant in Southern California’s literary community, she studied for many years in Donna Hilbert’s poetry workshop and has published extensively in independent journals, including Chiron Review. Her poetry is often narrative and accessible, discovering emotional complexity in apparently ordinary moments and preserving the voices and experiences of earlier generations.
Jean Esteve (1929–2026) was an American poet and artist whose work appeared in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Florida Review, Chiron Review, and other literary journals. A graduate of Cornell University, she returned seriously to both poetry and visual art later in life. Her books include Scud, The Winter Sun, and Off-Key, which was a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Esteve lived for many years on the Oregon coast.
Gary Every is an American poet, storyteller, journalist, teacher, and natural-history writer whose work is closely connected with the landscapes and cultures of the Southwest. He has written numerous books and spent years as a newspaper columnist in Arizona, combining poetry, folklore, humor, environmental observation, and regional history. His writing often reflects an intimate knowledge of desert plants, animals, and human communities. In 2025, he was selected as one of Sedona, Arizona’s first official Poets Laureate.
Alexis Rhone Fancher is an American poet and photographer whose work has appeared in hundreds of literary journals. She is the author of numerous poetry collections and has become a prominent voice in contemporary Los Angeles poetry. Her poem “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” was selected by Edward Hirsch for The Best American Poetry 2016. Fancher’s work often explores desire, grief, family, sexuality, danger, memory, and the emotional geography of Los Angeles.
Edward Field (1924-2026) was an acclaimed American poet, memoirist, fiction writer, translator, and World War II veteran. His first collection, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, received the Lamont Poetry Selection, and his many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, Prix de Rome, and a Lambda Literary Award. Field also wrote narration for the Academy Award-winning documentary To Be Alive. Known for direct, conversational storytelling, his poetry addresses sexuality, survival, urban life, aging, history, friendship, and the experience of being an outsider.
Ed Galing (1917–2013) was an American poet whose extraordinarily long and prolific career made him a beloved presence in the small press. Born on New York City’s Lower East Side, he wrote often about Jewish working-class life, childhood, family, military service, aging, poverty, injustice, and memory. His plainspoken poems appeared in countless magazines and numerous collections. Galing’s work combined toughness with compassion and retained an immediacy and emotional openness that won him generations of readers, editors, and fellow poets.
Tony Gloeggler is a New York poet whose direct narrative work frequently explores love, loss, disability, family, work, aging, and city life. His collections include One Wish Left, The Last Lie, Until the Last Light Leaves, and What Kind of Man. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, New York Quarterly, New Ohio Review, and many other journals. For more than forty years, Gloeggler worked with people with developmental disabilities, an experience that profoundly informs the humanity and emotional precision of his writing.
John Grey is an Australian-born poet, playwright, and fiction writer who has lived for many years in Providence, Rhode Island. His collections include Devil in the River, Poking the Gun: The Selected Poetry of John Grey, and The Body’s Last Days, along with numerous later books and chapbooks. His poems have appeared widely in American literary journals. Grey’s work combines narrative clarity with imaginative leaps, moving easily among relationships, landscape, memory, surreal encounters, popular culture, and the peculiarities of ordinary life.
Jay Griswold is an American poet born in New Orleans who has traveled extensively in the United States and abroad. He earned an M.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University and is the author of collections including Meditations for the Year of the Horse, The Landscape of Exile, and Conquistador. The latter won the 2004 Main Street Rag Book Award. Griswold’s poetry reflects his wide-ranging interests in travel, history, art, displacement, cultural encounters, and the shifting meanings of home.
Michael Hathaway is an American poet, editor, publisher, and founder of Chiron Review. He began publishing its predecessor, The Kindred Spirit, in 1982 and renamed the journal Chiron Review in 1989. Over four decades, he has published thousands of poets, fiction writers, essayists, artists, and photographers while also producing books through Chiron Review Press. His own poetry and prose are rooted in autobiography, relationships, family, cats, queer experience, rural Kansas, memory, humor, grief, and the sustaining power of chosen family.
Donna Hilbert is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, and playwright long associated with Southern California’s literary community. Her collections include Mansions, Deep Red, Feathers and Dust, Transforming Matter, Traveler in Paradise, and Gravity: New & Selected Poems. Born in Oklahoma, Hilbert brings warmth, clarity, and emotional directness to poems about family, childhood, motherhood, love, death, memory, and survival. She has also been an influential teacher and mentor to generations of Southern California poets.
Albert Huffstickler (1927–2002) was the poet laureate of Austin, Texas, in every sense but the official one — a fixture of its coffeehouses and a mentor to its younger writers for thirty years. Prolific and unpretentious, he published dozens of chapbooks and appeared in hundreds of small-press magazines; his collections include Working on My Death Chant, Walking Wounded and Why I Write in Coffee Houses and Diners. His poems of diners, buses and rented rooms found a devoted readership across the small press.
Lorri Jackson (1961–1990) was a Chicago poet whose fierce, fast, confessional work made her a leading voice of the city’s underground before her death at twenty-nine. She published in Chiron Review, Wormwood Review, Nerve Cowboy and many other small magazines; a posthumous collection, So What If It’s True, and later tributes have kept her work in print. Her name is still spoken with respect by the poets who read alongside her.
Ruth Moon Kempher, born in 1934, is an American poet, fiction writer, critic, teacher, editor, and publisher whose work has appeared in journals since the late 1950s. She has published more than thirty collections, including What I Can Tell You, winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. For more than two decades she taught English in Florida. Through Kings Estate Press, founded in the 1990s, Kempher has published and illustrated the work of numerous poets and independent writers.
Kyle Laws is an American poet, editor, publisher, and arts organizer based in Pueblo, Colorado. The author of numerous collections, including Ride the Pink Horse, Wildwood, and So Bright to Blind, she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance and publishes Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and she has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Laws has long been an energetic advocate for independent poetry and for building literary communities outside traditional publishing centers.
Lyn Lifshin (1942–2019) was one of the most prolific American poets of her generation and an important bridge between mainstream and independent literary publishing. She published scores of books and chapbooks, including Cold Comfort, Before It’s Light, Another Woman Who Looks Like Me, and Persephone. Her work appeared in Ploughshares, The American Scholar, Rolling Stone, and hundreds of small-press magazines. Her intense, intimate poetry often addressed sexuality, family, mothers and daughters, violence, memory, desire, and women’s lives.
Ellaraine Lockie is an American poet, nonfiction writer, editor, teacher, and widely traveled workshop leader. She is the author of numerous books and chapbooks and has received awards in poetry from several literary organizations and presses. Her work has appeared extensively in journals, anthologies, and online publications in the United States and abroad. Lockie’s poems frequently explore travel, family, cultural encounter, women’s experience, aging, memory, and place, combining accessible language with vivid imagery and carefully observed detail.
Gerald Locklin (1941–2021) was a prolific American poet, fiction writer, critic, and influential teacher whose witty, conversational work helped define West Coast “Stand Up Poetry.” He taught at California State University, Long Beach, from 1965 until 2007 and published thousands of poems and more than one hundred books and chapbooks. Locklin served as poetry editor of Chiron Review for three decades. His humor, generosity, literary independence, and encouragement of younger writers made him one of the journal’s defining voices.
Adrian C. Louis (1946–2018), a member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe, was born in Nevada and taught for many years at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation and at Southwest Minnesota State University. His collections include Fire Water World, Among the Dog Eaters, Ceremonies of the Damned and Random Exorcisms, and his novel Skins was filmed by Chris Eyre. Unsparing about reservation life and his own, his work was praised by Sherman Alexie as the model for his own beginnings.
Anthony Lucero is an American poet, filmmaker, screenwriter, actor, producer, journalist, and publisher. Chiron Review published one of his early poems, “The Living Party,” in 1992, beginning a long association with the magazine that has included poetry, interviews, broadsides, and books. His 92-page poem, The Clown, received praise from artists worldwide and was the inspiration for the feature film, Halo of Stars, which he also directed. The Living Party: Selected Earlier Poems 1989–2019 contains many of the poems from his early chapbooks. His intimate 2010 offering, dear little missy, was recently reimagined with photographer Massimo Leardini and is now available through Putzina Press.
John Macker is an American poet, essayist, and playwright closely identified with the landscapes and cultures of New Mexico and the American West. His numerous books include Burroughs at Santo Domingo, Adventures in the Gun Trade, Woman of the Disturbed Earth, Atlas of Wolves, and The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away: Selected Poems 1983–2018, a finalist for an Arizona/New Mexico Book Award. His work combines environmental concern, history, music, political awareness, outsider culture, and a deep attachment to desert landscapes.
Tamara Madison is an American poet and teacher whose work is rooted in the landscape, families, and cultural diversity of Southern California. Born in Covina and raised in Mecca, California, she has published widely in journals and anthologies, including Chiron Review. Her collection Wild Domestic was published by Pearl Editions. Madison’s poetry frequently explores family, animals, childhood, aging, relationships, and the surprising intersections between domestic life and the untamed natural world, often with warmth, wit, and close observation.
Clint Margrave is an American poet and novelist living in Southern California. His poetry collections include The Early Death of Men, Salute the Wreckage, and Visitor, published by NYQ Books. His poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, Cimarron Review, Ambit, and numerous other journals. He is also the author of the novel Lying Bastard and has served as a poetry editor for Chiron Review. His work combines narrative clarity, humor, skepticism, and emotional understatement.
Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel (1918–2007), known as the “Okie Poet” and “Dust Bowl Poet,” was born near Stroud, Oklahoma, and migrated with her family to California’s Central Valley in 1936. A sharecropper’s daughter, she became an extraordinary chronicler of migrant, working-class, and Central Valley life. McDaniel published more than fifty collections and was named Poet Laureate of Tulare. Her archives are preserved at UC Merced and Oklahoma State University, and her life was documented in the film Down an Old Road.
Jack Micheline (1929–1998), born Harold Silver in the Bronx, was a street poet and painter of the Beat generation, though he refused the label. His first book, River of Red Wine (1958), carried an introduction by Jack Kerouac; later collections include North of Manhattan and Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints. He lived his last decades in San Francisco, reading in bars and painting, and died on a BART train. He was a hero to the small press, which published him when no one else would.
Tony Moffeit (1941-2026) was an American poet whose energetic, jazz- and blues-inflected work draws upon music, outlaw mythology, popular culture, the Southwest, and figures ranging from Frida Kahlo to Billy the Kid. His many collections include Pueblo Blues, Luminous Animal, Neon Peppers, and Poetry Is Dangerous: The Poet Is an Outlaw. Active in the independent press for decades, Moffeit writes in a high-energy, improvisational style that brings the rhythms of jazz, blues, and performance into the printed poem.
Roger Netzer is an American poet and longtime contributor to Chiron Review whose work has appeared repeatedly in the independent literary press. His poetry belongs to the conversational small-press tradition that values clarity, lived experience, individual voice, and close observation over academic fashion. Netzer’s poems frequently focus on memory, relationships, aging, daily experience, and the odd revelations hidden within apparently ordinary moments. He has remained a familiar presence to readers of Chiron Review across many years and issues.
B.Z. Niditch is an American poet, playwright, fiction writer, and teacher whose work has appeared extensively in literary journals in the United States and internationally. Publications carrying his work include Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Review, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and Prism International. Based in Massachusetts, Niditch is an exceptionally prolific writer whose compact, lyrical work ranges through art, music, history, politics, memory, landscape, and contemporary life.
Robert Peters (1924–2014) was a poet, critic and scholar born in Eagle River, Wisconsin, who taught for many years at the University of California, Irvine. The death of his young son in 1960 produced Songs for a Son, the first of more than thirty collections; later books took on historical and invented voices, from Ludwig of Bavaria to Elisabeth Báthory. As a critic he was fearless and funny in The Great American Poetry Bake-Off and Hunting the Snark. Chiron Review Press published his Love Poems for Robert Mitchum in 1992.
Marge Piercy is an acclaimed American poet, novelist, essayist, and feminist writer. The author of roughly twenty poetry collections and seventeen novels, her books include The Hunger Moon, Made in Detroit, Woman on the Edge of Time, Gone to Soldiers, and He, She and It, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Piercy’s politically engaged writing encompasses feminism, class, Jewish identity, sexuality, war, environmentalism, love, work, family, and social justice, combining accessibility with intellectual and emotional force.
Charles Plymell, born in 1935 in Holcomb, Kansas, is a poet, publisher and a bridge between the Beat generation and the underground press that followed it. In San Francisco in the 1960s he shared a house with Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg and printed the first issue of Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix on his own press. His books include Apocalypse Rose, The Last of the Moccasins and Was Poe Afraid?. With his wife Pamela he has run Cherry Valley Editions in upstate New York since 1974, publishing Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs and many younger writers.
Kenneth Pobo is an American poet, teacher, editor, and longtime participant in LGBTQ+ and independent literary communities. His numerous collections include Uneven Steven, Bend of Quiet, and Loplop in a Red City. His poems often draw upon queer experience, gardening, popular music, visual art, memory, relationships, and the strangeness hidden within ordinary life. A widely published small-press poet, Pobo has received several chapbook awards and has spent decades teaching literature and creative writing while encouraging other poets.
Wendy Rainey is an American poet and fiction writer and a contributing poetry editor of Chiron Review. Her books include Hollywood Church: Short Stories and Poems and Girl on the Highway. Her work has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Trailer Park Quarterly, Red Fez, and other literary publications. Rainey studied with Jack Grapes and Gerald Locklin and received the 2022 Annie Menebroker Poetry Award. Her writing combines narrative directness, Southern California observation, humor, vulnerability, and sympathy for outsiders.
Charles Rammelkamp is an American poet, fiction writer, editor, critic, and reviewer whose work has appeared extensively in literary journals in the United States and abroad. The author of numerous poetry collections and chapbooks, he frequently employs narrative and persona to explore American history, crime, family, politics, popular culture, and social conflict. A longtime editor and energetic supporter of independent publishing, Rammelkamp has also written hundreds of reviews, helping bring attention to poets and presses throughout the small-press community.
Kevin Ridgeway is a Southern California poet whose work has appeared widely in independent literary journals. Born in Bellflower and raised in Whittier, California, he is the author of several collections and chapbooks, including Burn Through Today. His direct, darkly humorous poetry draws upon addiction and recovery, mental turmoil, relationships, work, popular culture, and the rougher edges of everyday Southern California life. Ridgeway writes with candor about survival while retaining an eye for absurdity, tenderness, and unexpected grace.
Linda Rocheleau is an American poet whose collection Heartwood was published in 2023. A student and later literary colleague of Gerald Locklin, she has published poems in Chiron Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, and other independent journals and has participated widely in readings and small-press literary events. Her accessible, narrative poetry moves through small towns, mountains, coastlines, bars, journeys, relationships, and memorable characters, combining a traveler’s eye for place with humor, compassion, and an affection for unconventional lives.
Miriam Sagan, born in 1954 in New York, has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 1984, where she founded and long directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. She is the author of some thirty books of poetry, fiction and memoir, including Searching for a Mustard Seed, Map of the Lost, Seven Places in America and Bluebeard’s Castle, and she edits the blog Miriam’s Well. Her poems appeared in Chiron Review across three decades.
Mather Schneider is an American poet and fiction writer whose unsentimental narrative work draws heavily upon working-class life and his years driving a taxi. His books include Drought Resistant Strain, He Took a Cab, and Prickly. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, New York Quarterly, Chiron Review, and many other journals. Schneider writes with direct language, dark humor, and sharp observation about labor, poverty, relationships, travel, loneliness, and people rarely represented in conventional literary poetry.
Jared Smith is an American poet, editor, and essayist and the author of more than fifteen volumes of poetry. His work has appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies internationally. His books include Grassroots, The Collected Poems of Jared Smith, To the Dark Angels, and A Sphere Encased in Fire and Life. He has served on editorial boards including those of The New York Quarterly and The Pedestal Magazine. His poetry frequently joins social consciousness with expansive historical and philosophical concerns.
Joan Jobe Smith, born in 1940 in Paris, Texas, and raised in Southern California, worked seven years as a go-go dancer before earning degrees at Cal State Long Beach and UC Irvine. In 1974 she founded Pearl, the Long Beach magazine she edited with Marilyn Johnson for nearly forty years, publishing Bukowski, Locklin and hundreds of small-press poets. Her own books include Jehovah Jukebox, The Pow Wow Café, a finalist for the Forward Prize in Britain, and the memoir Tales of an Ancient Go-Go Girl. She is married to the poet Fred Voss.
Clifton Snider (1947–2021) was an American poet, novelist, literary critic, scholar, and educator. The author of numerous poetry collections and novels, his books include Moonman: New and Selected Poems, The Alchemy of Opposites, Aspens in the Wind, and Wrestling with Angels. A longtime professor at California State University, Long Beach, he was also an important early scholar of gay and lesbian literature. His creative and critical work frequently drew upon queer experience, spirituality, mythology, psychology, and Jungian thought.
The Poet Spiel (1941-2024) was the literary identity of American poet and visual artist Thoss W. “Tom” Taylor, born in Colorado. Over a long career in both writing and art, he has created poetry, drawings, paintings, and conceptual work confronting sexuality, disability, illness, aging, social convention, alienation, politics, and outsider experience. His writing has appeared widely in the independent press, including Chiron Review, while his visual art has been exhibited professionally and recognized in major art-reference collections.
William Stafford (1914–1993) was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and became one of the most quietly influential American poets of the century. A conscientious objector during the Second World War, he taught for many years at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon and wrote a poem nearly every morning of his adult life. Traveling Through the Dark won the National Book Award in 1963; he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and as Oregon’s Poet Laureate. His single appearance in Chiron Review is a Kansas poet returning, briefly, to a Kansas magazine.
Belinda Subraman is an American poet, artist, editor, interviewer, and independent publisher who has been active in literary culture since the 1970s. While living in Germany she edited the international literary magazine Gypsy and later produced Sanctuary, a series of audio recordings featuring poets and musicians. She subsequently founded GAS: Poetry, Art & Music. Subraman’s career reflects the multimedia, international, do-it-yourself spirit of the small press. Her literary archives are housed at the University of New Mexico.
Marc Swan is an American poet whose work has appeared in Chiron Review, Gargoyle, Nerve Cowboy, Crannóg, Queen’s Quarterly, subTerrain, and other literary journals. His collections include all it would take. After many years on Cape Cod, he made his home in coastal Maine. Swan’s poetry frequently engages travel, war, memory, aging, relationships, landscape, and the accumulation of experience over a lifetime, using restrained language and vivid physical detail to uncover the emotional resonance of seemingly ordinary moments.
Christine Swanberg is an American poet, teacher, and mentor who became the first official Poet Laureate of Rockford, Illinois. The author of numerous poetry collections, she has published widely in literary journals and anthologies and has spent decades teaching workshops and encouraging other writers. Swanberg’s poetry often combines lyricism, spirituality, nature, family history, travel, grief, and renewal. Her work is distinguished by an openness to wonder and by its recurring interest in transformation, resilience, and the imaginative possibilities of ordinary life.
James Valvis is an American poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in hundreds of literary journals, including Rattle, The Sun, New York Quarterly, Nimrod, River Styx, Hanging Loose, Atlanta Review, and Chiron Review. Prolific in both poetry and short fiction, Valvis writes about marriage, work, class, memory, family, mortality, and the absurdities of everyday existence. His writing combines emotional directness, narrative momentum, humor, darkness, and an alertness to sudden moments of beauty and human connection.
Richard Vargas is an American poet, editor, and publisher born in Compton, California. He studied with Gerald Locklin at California State University, Long Beach, and later earned an MFA from the University of New Mexico. He edited the influential Tequila Review and is the author of McLife, American Jesus, Guernica, revisited, and other collections. His direct, politically alert poems address family, labor, war, Chicano identity, masculinity, American culture, and social inequality while retaining warmth, humor, and narrative accessibility.
Fred Voss (1952–2025) was an American poet and novelist celebrated internationally for his writing about machinists, factories, labor, and working-class life. A machinist himself for more than forty years, he transformed shop-floor experience into a distinctive body of socially engaged poetry. His books include Goodstone and Carnegie Hall with Tin Walls. Voss wrote with unusual authority about physical labor, class, economic injustice, dignity, and the creative intelligence of workers, becoming one of contemporary poetry’s foremost voices of industrial life.
Charles Harper Webb is an acclaimed American poet, fiction writer, editor, teacher, former professional rock musician, and psychotherapist. A leading exponent of “Stand Up Poetry,” he is the author of numerous collections, including Reading the Water, Amplified Dog, Shadow Ball, Brain Camp, and Sidebend World. His honors include a Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Webb taught for many years at California State University, Long Beach, where he influenced generations of writers.
Mark Weber is an American poet, visual artist, musician, jazz historian, publisher, and longtime participant in alternative literary and music communities. Raised in Southern California and later based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he founded Zerx Press and has published numerous poetry collections, including Drunk City, Swindler’s Harmonica Siesta, and Existential Hum. His work has appeared in Chiron Review, Wormwood Review, and other independent journals. His poems share with his visual art and music an improvisational, idiosyncratic spirit.
Phil Weidman (1936–2020) was an American poet and visual artist and a longtime figure in Sacramento’s literary and art communities. He published thirteen books of poetry, beginning with Sixes in 1968 and concluding with Rungs of the Ladder. His poems appeared in Chiron Review, Wormwood Review, Olé, and numerous other independent publications. As a visual artist, Weidman was closely associated with Sacramento’s influential Slant Step phenomenon, giving his career an unusual place at the intersection of experimental art and small-press poetry.
Paul Weinman (1940–2023) was a poet and educator in Albany, New York, where he worked for decades at the New York State Museum. One of the most widely published poets of the mimeo and small-press world, he produced well over a hundred chapbooks, many under his own White Boy imprint, and appeared in Chiron Review from its earliest years. His short, sharp poems, often about boyhood and the Adirondacks, were traded through the mail among small-press poets for forty years.
Rafael Zepeda, born in 1943, taught creative writing at California State University, Long Beach, for many years alongside Gerald Locklin, with whom he collaborated on several books and a long-running friendship. His poems and stories of Long Beach, Mexico and the racetrack appear in The Yellow Ford of Texas, Horse Medicine and Desperados, and he was a regular in Pearl, Wormwood Review and Chiron Review.
