Poet Biographies
Meet the authors behind Issue 2 of Gleam:
Joseph Salvatore Aversano | Leah Baer | Mela Blust | Karen Cline-Tardiff | Julie A. Dickson | Steven Duncan | Jeff Ewing | Jennifer Franklin | Katie Kemple | Sharon Waller Knutson | Diane C. LeBlanc | Carolyn Martin | Ann E. Michael | Tade. M. Odunmbaku | Sarah Provost | Kat Good-Schiff | Jenner Shaffer | Kerry Trautman | Lisken Van Pelt Dus | Sherre Vernon | Lori Witzel
Joseph Salvatore Aversano
Joseph Salvatore Aversano lives on the central Anatolian steppe. His poetry has been recently published in bones, E-ratio, NOON: journal of the short poem, Die Leere Mitte, Otoliths, and Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics.
Leah Baer
Leah Baer is a 76-year old Eldress, writer, and lover of life. After she started thinking seriously of herself as a writer (in 2016), she published her story, “What Our Bodies Were Then” in Voice Catcher, and her poems in Unchaste Readers. Her storytelling performances with Roar, and her acting performances with Big Island Writers can be found on YouTube. Her Facebook page, Jouissance Sans Cesse, celebrates the creative fire of older women, and her invented word for that life force is “gyneluminesce.” Leah’s memoir, The History of These Desires, will be published in 2025.
Mela Blust
Mela Blust is a trauma survivor, and a mother. Since seeking publication, Mela’s work has been nominated for Best Of The Net and the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander, Rust+Moth, The Nassau Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Collective Unrest, and many more. Her debut poetry collection, Skeleton Parade, is available with Apep Publications and her second collection, They Found a Woman’s Body, is available with Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. She is a contributing editor for Barren Magazine, and can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.
Karen Cline-Tardiff
Karen Cline-Tardiff has been writing as long as she could hold a pen. Her work has appeared in several different anthologies and journals, both online and in print. She founded the Aransas County Poetry Society and hosted a monthly Open Mic (pre-Covid). She has a Kindle edition book of poetry, Stumbling to Breathe. She is Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
Julie A. Dickson
Julie A. Dickson is a poet and writer of YA fiction whose work includes nature, teen issues, captive elephant advocacy, environment and current events. Dickson has a degree from UNH and works with elderly persons. She shares her home with two rescued feral cats, Cam and Claire and is on the board of the Poetry Society of NH.
Her poetry appears in journals including Ekphrastic Review, Gleam, Poetry Quarterly and others. She was nominated in 2018 for a Push Cart Prize. Her full length works are available on Amazon.
Steven Duncan
Steven Duncan is a poet and medical student living in Dallas, TX. His poetry has been featured by Ink & Nebula, Mojave River Review, Thimble, Prolific Press and others. Steven was the 2018 winner of the Redrock Writers’ Founders Award. You can view more published work by visiting: www.stevenduncan.net.
Jeff Ewing
Jeff Ewing is the author of the short story collection ‘The Middle Ground,’ published by Into the Void Press, and the poetry collection ‘Wind Apples,’ coming in 2021 from Terrapin Books. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Southwest Review, ZYZZYVA, Willow Springs, Subtropics, Cherry Tree, and Utne Reader. He lives in Sacramento, California.
Jennifer Franklin
Jennifer Franklin has published two full-length collections, most recently No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her third book, If Some God Shakes Your House, will be published by Four Way Books in 2023. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, JAMA, Love’s Executive Order, The Nation, Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA program. For the past seven years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series, serves as Program Director, and co-edits Slapering Hol Press. She lives in New York City. Her website is jenniferfranklinpoet.com.
Katie Kemple
Katie Kemple (she/her) Grew up in rural New York, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets to a busted chair in an abandoned field. Her work appears on small pieces of paper.
Sharon Waller Knutson
Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who writes poetry from her Arizona desert home. Her work has appeared in Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Five-Two, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review, The Song Is…, Orange Room Review, Literary Mama, Wild Goose Poetry Review and U.S. Worksheets. She is the author of five chapbooks: Dancing with a Scorpion, My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields, Desert Directions, They Affectionately Call Her a Dinosaur and I Did It Anyway.
Diane C. LeBlanc
Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. Poetry chapbooks include This Space for Message, Sudden Geography, Dancer with Good Sow, and Hope in Zone Four. Her work has received numerous awards, including Mid-American Review’s 2019 Fineline Competition prize. Poems and essays appear in journals including Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, and Sweet, among others. A new collection of poems, The Feast Delayed, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in April 2021.
Carolyn Martin
From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. Her poems have appeared in more than 130 journals and anthologies throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. Currently, she is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation. Find out more at www.carolynmartinpoet.com.
Ann E. Michael
Ann E. Michael is the author of Barefoot Girls, Water-Rites, and the forthcoming The Red Queen Hypothesis, among other books, and currently directs the writing center at DeSales University in eastern Pennsylvania.
Tade M. Odunmbaku
Tade M. Odunmbaku (Penname – Tmishael) is a Statistician and Consultant in love with poetry. Hailing from West Africa, she started writing as a teen although pursuing a Science path. She loves to read, to murmur in her sleep and to write furiously on good days and bad. Her poems are mostly pathos filled, melancholic and on bleeding black roses. For her, “Poetry is the door to elusive thoughts, to illusions, to dimensions no one has reached… to life”
Sarah Provost
An award-winning collection of Sarah Provost’s poetry, Inland, Thinking of Waves, has been published by Cleveland University Press. She has written screenplays for HBO, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount and others. Her stage plays have been produced in New York, London, Los Angeles and elsewhere, including a play that won a Massachusetts Council on the Arts grant. She has also been granted fellowships at Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has an MFA in poetry and playwriting from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Kat Good-Schiff
Kat Good-Schiff is a librarian and writer living in western Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in poetry from Goddard College. Her work has appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry, California Quarterly, Meat for Tea, PANK, and elsewhere.
Jenner Shaffer
Jenner Shaffer is an Ozark native living at Pomme de Terre Reservoir in southwest Missouri. He is a graduate of Missouri State University, former editor of Moon City Literary Review, a veteran of the 101st Airborne Division, former college educator, worked for Dell Computer Corporation, Bass Pro Shops, and Tim Burrows Metal Art & Design. Currently he manages a farm specializing in heirloom peppers and rare chicken breeds. In his free time, he enjoys reading literature, writing, photography, fishing, and painting.
Kerry Trautman
Kerry Trautman is a lifelong Ohioan, a founder/admin for ToledoPoet.com, and a poetry editor for Red Fez. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in several anthologies and journals such as Slippery Elm, Free State Review, Midwestern Gothic, Paper & Ink, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Alimentum. Her poetry books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) and To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020.)
Lisken Van Pelt Dus
Lisken Van Pelt Dus teaches writing, languages, and martial arts in western Massachusetts. Her award-winning poetry can be found in many print and online journals, such as Conduit, The South Carolina Review, and upstreet, as well as in her chapbook, Everywhere at Once (2009, Pudding House) and full-length book, What We’re Made Of (2016, Cherry Grove).
Sherre Vernon
Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is a seeker of a mystical grammar and a recipient of the Parent-Writer Fellowship at The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings (fiction) and The Name is Perilous (poetry). Readers describe Sherre’s work as heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent. To read more of her work, visit www.sherrevernon.com/publications and tag her into conversation @sherrevernon
Lori Witzel
Lori Witzel has been writing poetry, and rarely submitting her work, since the early 1990s. The new form of the cadralor has inspired her most recent writing. Lori Witzel’s blog Chatoyance contains sketches, photos, and poems that constitute souvenirs from her journeys from Central Texas through to Portland, Oregon, where she resides today, with three cats and a dog, and an abundance of goldfinches, pine siskins, and bushtits.
Ready to write your own cadralor?
About Us
Gleam is a journal wholly devoted to the new poetic form, the cadralor, created by Gleam’s founding co-editors, Lori Howe and Christopher Cadra. The cadralor consists of five short, unrelated, highly-visual stanzas.
Get In Touch
If you are interested in submitting your own cadralor poem or if you have questions, you can reach out to our Gleam email. We look forward to hearing from you!
Meet the Editors
The cadralor was co-created by:
• Lori Howe, Editor in Chief
• Christopher Cadra, Senior Editor
Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor 