And When There Was No Crawdad We Ate Sand

Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two collections

of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full

of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could

one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless

love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-

residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted

P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an

editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has

appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase

Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review,

Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various

other journals and anthologies. He lives somewhere in

the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, with a rooster

named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe.

Abraham Smith was raised around Ladysmith,

Wisconsin, and lives along the Wasatch Front, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State University. His most recent poetry collection is One Warm Morning (Stubborn Mule Press, 2025). Away from his desk, Smith improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin' Yarns: thesnarlinyarnsut.bandcamp.com.

John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle,

MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry,

including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems:

2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the

Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022), Pocatello

Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023) and Dead

Photographs, (Stubborn Mule Press, 2024). He may be

reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

Originally from the flatlands of central Illinois, Justin

Hamm now lives near Twain territory in Missouri. He

is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, O

Death, Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021,

The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin;

six poetry chapbooks; and a book of photographs

entitled Midwestern. He is also the creator of Poet

Baseball Cards and the founding editor of the museum

of americana.