Home
The Avalon Literary Review
Summer 2026 Biographies:
Paul Bavister has published three poetry collections with Two Rivers Press, most recently The Prawn Season. His work has appeared in Oxford Poetry, The Rialto, The North, Butcher’s Dog, and Dark Winter. He was Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Reading and taught at Birkbeck, University of London.
Bill Baynes is from California.
Morgan Boyer is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018), If I Wasn’t Sacred (Alien Buddha Press, 2025) and a graduate of Carlow University. Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Pennsylvania English, and Voices from the Attic. Boyer was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2025.
Marietta Calvanico built a career in advertising/marketing, worked with her architect husband in client relations, raised a daughter who is a teacher, and played bass in late-night bars. She has shared her homes with many cats. Her poetry, fiction and memoir pieces have appeared online and in print.
Loralee Clark resides in Virginia; her website is sites.google.com/view/loraleeclark. Her Substack, which focuses on the process of creativity, is nosuchthingasfailure.substack.com.
Maureen Clark’s This Insatiable August was released by Signature Books and won the AML Award for Best Poetry Book of 2024. Her memoir Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl was released by Hypatia Press. She received her MFA from the University of Utah and taught there for 20 years.
Brian Connelly is a writer from West Lafayette, Indiana, whose fiction explores the surreal, the symbolic, and the strange spaces where ordinary life begins to fracture. His work has previously appeared in Antipodean SF, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, and Down in the Dirt.
Terence Culleton’s fourth volume of poetry, Message From a Floating Dock, came out in the spring through White Violet Press. Look for news about it on his website: terenceculletonpoetry.com, where you can read his blogs, catch up on his breathlessly exciting life as a writer, and even purchase his other three books, A Communion of Saints, Eternal Life, and A Tree and Gone.
Liam Drake is originally from New York. A Gypsy just wandering looking for those magic moments.
Chris Dungey is a retired auto worker in MI. He rides a mountain bike to limit his f.u.p.a. and a Honda scooter for the planet. More than 180 of his poems have appeared in litmags and online. Most recently in Poetry Lighthouse, Thimble Literary, and Argyle Review. Forthcoming in Abraxas.
David A. Goodrum is the author of Abrupt Edges (2025), Vitals and Other Signs of Life (2024) and Sparse Poetica (2023). Recent publications appear in The Orchards Poetry Journal (which awarded his poem Winter Inquisition a Pushcart Nomination), Cirque, and Triggerfish Critical Review. David lives in Corvallis, Oregon. See more at www.davidgoodrum.com.
David Henson’s work has been selected for the 2025 Wigleaf long list and has appeared in various journals including Best Microfictions 2025, Moonpark Review, Gone Lawn, and Ghost Parachute. His website is http://writings217.wordpress.com. His X handle is @annalou8.
Jo Huang is a NYC-based writer whose work spans television and short fiction. Her stories explore the lives of outsiders, underdogs, and everyday people searching for their place in the world.
Gavin Kayner lives and writes in the Sonoran Desert. His poetry, prose and plays have won numerous awards and appeared in a variety of publications. A chapbook of poems titled A Matter of Details will be available from Kelsay Books in the near future.
Irene Kim is a high school student who loves visual art and writing. Her work has been recognized in local exhibitions and school publications. When she’s not drawing or writing, she enjoys reading poetry, walking in the rain, and experimenting with collage. Irene hopes to continue creating work that captures both the quiet and the extraordinary.
Joe Labriola is a professor of writing at Stony Brook University in New York, where he is also the Environmental Club’s Faculty Advisor. His fiction and essays focus on speculative themes or environmental issues. He is an avid beach cleaner and sustainability advocate, hosting regular cleanup events and lectures. You can most often find him scouring the beaches for trash, treasures, and inspiration for his next story.
Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), seven volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines 2023). His new and selected poems, Dancing in the Dark, is due in early 2027.
David Anson Lee is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose work explores memory, family, place, and the quiet intersections between the natural world and the passage of time. His poems often reflect on aging, continuity, and the small, human moments that shape a life, balancing lyric intimacy with restraint and subtle humor. David’s work has appeared in a range of literary journals, and he continues to write with an interest in how ordinary experiences carry lasting emotional weight. He lives in the United States, where he walks familiar paths, observes seasonal change, and believes poetry remains one of the most faithful ways to mark time.
Dibyangana Maji is a young poet from India whose work explores memory, growth, and the quiet unraveling of youth. Her writing has appeared in Spillwords Press, Sky Island Journal, Wildsound Writing Festival, Literary Yard, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Writer’s Workout, Sea Glass Literary Magazine, Catalogue Zine, and other literary journals and anthologies. She writes to remember, and sometimes, to forget.
Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. Drawing on an M.Sc. in Environmental Science and experience as a longform fiction reader for Ploughshares, his work appears or is forthcoming in Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Expat Press, Thieving Magpie, Flash Fiction Online, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at ashleymangtani.com
Curtis C. Morgan is a retired IT contractor and former high school teacher who came to essay writing later in life. His work has appeared in Mother Earth News, Responsible Statecraft, Prime Number Magazine, Across the Margin, and Good Men Project. He is slowly assembling a memoir-in-essays collection called Who Am I, and considers himself lucky whenever an editor agrees to publish the answer to that question, one essay at a time.
Ryan Nelson lives in Lincoln, Nebraska and enjoys time spent around the campfire. His poetry has appeared in Hummingbird, The Lincoln Underground, Broad River Review, Blue Unicorn, Haiku Journal, Fine Lines, Lone Mountain Literary Society, New Plains Review, and in Plainsongs, where Slow Bite was published as an award poem.
Bruce Parks is a writer of fiction, essays and plays. He has published in James Joyce’s Outsiders, and The International Anthony Burgess Foundation End of the World Newsletter. Abel’s Blood recently appeared in Judith Magazine. He lives in Newbury, Massachusetts.
Cathy Porter’s poetry has appeared in Plainsongs, Homestead Review, California Quarterly, Trajectory, Cottonwood, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, and various other journals. She has several chapbooks available from Finishing Line Press, Dancing Girl Press, Maverick Duck Press, and Bottlecap Press. Her latest chapbook, Lives In The Balance, is out now with Maverick Duck Press. Cathy has been nominated for several Pushcart prizes. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize-winning book Good Work was published by Evening Street Press. A 14-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of two other full-length books, What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks. Website: matthewjspireng.com.
Charles Sutphin is a retired professor, attorney, journalist and capitalist. He volunteers at the Northside Food Pantry and serves on several not-for-profit boards. Married for 35 years, he has two children, two dogs and a koi pond. In recent years his writing has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Literally Stories, Vita Poetica, Metaworker, CafeLit, Helix Literary Review, Agape Review, Visible Magazine and other publications.
Kelly Talbot has edited books and other content for 20 years for Wiley, Macmillan, Oxford, Pearson Education, and other publishers. Kelly’s writing has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies.
