Poet Biographies

Meet the authors behind Issue 7 of Gleam:

Tina Barry | Rose Mary Boehm | Jamey Boelhower | Becky Boling | Sarah Carleton | Ginny Connors | Kate Copeland | Jane Dougherty | Sara Dykins | N.L. Holmes Kantzios | J.I. Kleinberg | Tara Knight | Carolyn Martin | Jimmy Pappas | Kathy Peterson | Jenner Shaffer| Merril D. Smith | Mary Stone | Catherine Strayhall | Kathryn Vanspeckeren | Susan Vespoli | Sterling Warner | Ingrid Wilson | Jon Yungkans

Tina Barry

Tina Barry is the author of Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower. Her writing can be found in The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, Rattle, Verse Daily, Trampset, ONE ART, A-Minor, Nixes Mate, Gyroscope Review and elsewhere. Tina is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has several Best of the Net nods. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.

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Rose Mary Boehm

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was three times nominated for a ‘Pushcart’ and once for ‘Best of Net’. DO OCEANS HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS? (Kelsay Books July 2022), WHISTLING IN THE DARK (Cyberwit July 2022), and SAUDADE (December 2022) are available on Amazon. Also available on Amazon is a new collection, LIFE STUFF, published by Kelsay Books November 2023. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

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Becky Boling

Retired professor & “naturalized” Minnesotan, Becky Boling has published creative nonfiction, dramatic monologues, short stories, poetry (The Ekphrastic Review, Lost Lake Folk Opera, Willows Wept Review, Persimmon Tree, 3rdWednesday Magazine, Moss Puppy Magazine, visualverse.org). Two of her monologues were performed for Northfield’s SOLOS: Monologue Writing and Performance Festival. Her poems have won competitions—Northfield Sidewalk Poetry & Red Wing Arts’ Poet-Artist Collaboration—and twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. MPR’s Pandemic Poetry featured her poems. She is published in the Ramsey County Library’s anthology, This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year.

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Sarah Carleton

Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Chattahoochee Review, Tar River Poetry, Split Rock Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and New Ohio Review. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.

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Ginny Connors

Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of four full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is Without Goodbyes: From Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk Kahnawake.Her chapbook, Under the Porch, won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Connors holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She runs a small poetry press, Grayson Books. A Board Member of the Connecticut Poetry Society, she is co-editor of Connecticut River Review. 

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Jane Dougherty

Jane Dougherty lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.

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Sara Dykins

Sara Dykins lives and gardens in Florida with her canine and human companions. Her stories and poems are the humus formed from the compost of her life.

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Niki Holmes Kantzios

N.L. Holmes is an archaeologist who has also been an artist, an interior decorator, and a cloistered nun. She is the author of thirteen historical novels and has published poetry in Poetry Breakfast and Shark Reef. She lives with her husband, cats, chickens, and geese in rural France, where she weaves, dances, plays the violin, and reads.

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Tara Knight

Tara Knight is a healthcare provider in a small hockey town in northern Ontario. First published in Poetry is You she is now older and wiser. Tara’s work can also be found in the Literary Hatchet Magazine Issue 32, and Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor Issue 5. Tara’s work was also longlisted for the 2022 Raven Short Story Contest (Pulp Literature)

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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 175 journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. Currently,she is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation. For more, go to www.carolynmartinpoet.com.

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Jimmy Pappas

Jimmy Pappas was a winner of the Rattle chapbook prize for “Falling off the Empire State Building,” a winner of the Rattle Readers Choice Award for “Bobby’s Story,” and a Pushcart Prize nominee from Rattle for “The Gray Man.” Published in over 100 journals, Jimmy now runs a weekly Zoom event known as A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends. 

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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 101^st 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.

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Merril D. Smith

Merril D. Smith lives in southern New Jersey. Her poetry has been published in journals including Black Bough Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Humana Obscura, and anthologies, such as the recent Our Own Coordinates: Poems about Dementia. Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts, was published by Nightingale & Sparrow Press.

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Mary Stone

Mary Specker Stone’s poems have appeared in Image Journal; The Healing Art of Writing, vol.1; New Verse News; Gyroscope Review, Sheila-na-Gig Online, and other journals. Her chapbook, Valentine’s Dinner at Wren & Wolf, will be released in early 2024. A former medical writer and college writing instructor, Mary now serves as a spiritual director and leads poetry salons in the greater Phoenix area.

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Kathryn Vanspeckeren

Kathryn Van Spanckeren is a retired literature professor and practicing Buddhist. She fell in love with Gary Snyder’s poetry as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the 60s.  As a grad student at Harvard she studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.  At Naropa she studied with Allen Ginsberg. She published books on Margaret Atwood and John Gardener. To further peace she wrote Outline of American Literature for the US State Department, which translated it into many languages and maintains it free online. She shuttles between her home in Santa Barbara, California, and Tampa, Florida where she pilots a project to plant 30,000 trees by 2030. 

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Susan Vespoli

Susan Vespoli writes poems from Phoenix, AZ. Her work has been published in Rattle, Gyroscope Review, New Verse News, Nasty Women Poets Anthology of Subversive Verse, and others. She is the author of Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press), Cactus as Bad Boy (Kelsay Books), and One of Them Was Mine (Kelsay Books). https://susanvespoli.com/

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Sterling Warner

An award-winning author, poet, and English Professor, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared in many international literary magazines, journals, and anthologies such as The Ekphrastic Review, Gleam: The Journal of the Cadralor, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Fib Review, and Sparks of Calliope. Warner has written eight of poetry, including Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Memento Mori: A Chapbook Redux, Edges, Rags & Feathers, Serpent’s Tooth, Flytraps, and Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction (2022)—as well as Masques:Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Currently, he writes, turns wood, and hosts virtual poetry readings in Washington State. 

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Jon Yungkans

Jonathan Yungkans writes in the wee hours of what some call morning and others some mild form of insanity while listening for owls and watching a large skunk meander under the foundation of a century-old house. He is thankful when his writing is less noxious than the latter, jittery creature on the other side of those floorboards. He works as an in-home health-care provider, fueled by copious amounts of coffee while finding time for the occasional deep breath. His poems have appeared in Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Panoply, Unbroken and other publications.

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