Read: Excerpt from Beth Gilstrap's There is News Along the Ohio River (Cincinnati Review), and Lee Potts' "A Time of Splinters" (Moist Poetry Journal)

Purchase: Deadheading & Other Stories (Red Hen Press, 2021) by Beth Gilstrap and We Will Miss the Stars in the Morningby Lee Potts

Beth Gilstrap is the author of Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), Winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, short-listed for the Stanford Libraries William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, Bronze-winner of Reader Views Literary Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 Foreword Reviews Awards in Short Fiction. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. Born and raised near Charlotte, she and her house full of critters now call the Charleston-metro area home. She also lives with c-PTSD and is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness. For the ’24/’25 academic year, she’ll be in service with Americorps/Reading Partners.

Lee Potts (he/him) is author of two poetry chapbooks: We Will Miss the Stars in the Morning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and And Drought Will Follow (Frosted Fire, 2021). He was poetry editor at Barren Magazine from 2020 to 2023 and co-editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly back in the late 80s and early 90s. He is a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee. His work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He lives just outside of Philadelphia with his wife, the last kid still at home, and two cats named Franny and Zooey.

Further Reading:

Black Lily Zine

Stone Circle Review

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Circe by Madeline Miller

Andrei Tarkovsky (particularly Stalker)

Aftersun (Dir. by Charlotte Wells)

Aubrey Hirsch

Poor Things (Dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos)

Little Fiction Big Truths

Barren Magazine

Painted Bride Quarterly