Harbor Review
Poetry & Art

About


 

About Harbor Review

Harbor Review is an online space for poetry and art. We publish two issues a year in the winter and summer. We are interested in work that shocks and inspires. We are interested in strange and beautiful language, image, and metaphor. We are committed to giving diverse voices a home. New or experienced, we want to hear from you.

Please visit Small Harbor Publishing for more information about our publisher and our imprint, Harbor Editions.

 

publisher

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down (Persea Books, forthcoming), winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award; Cataloguing Pain (YesYes Books, 2023); Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir (BlazeVox, 2022); and Slowly/Suddenly (VA Press, 2021). She is also the author of the chapbooks fiery poppies bruising their own throats (Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming), Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022), Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). Allison is the Founder and Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Editor at the museum of americana. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. For more information, visit allisonblevins.com.

Editor-in-Chief

Joan Kwon Glass (she/her) is the biracial, Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest & author of three chapbooks (Harbor Editions & Milk & Cake Press). Joan is a Brooklyn Poets mentor, poet laureate of Milford, CT & poetry co-editor of West Trestle Review. She is a proud Smith College graduate & has been a public school educator for 20 years. Her poems have appeared in Diode, Rattle, The Rupture, South Florida Poetry Journal & many others & have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Sundress Anthology Best of the Net. She grew up in Michigan & South Korea & lives in Connecticut with her family.

Managing Editor

Kristiane Weeks-Rogers (she/her) is a Poet-Writer living in western Colorado. Her debut poetry collection, Self-Anointment with Lemons, was released in September 2021 by Finishing Line Press. She is the 2nd place winner of Casa Cultural de las Americas and University of Houston’s inaugural Poetic Bridges contest and author of the chap collection Become Skeletons published by the University of Houston in 2018. She grew up around Lake Michigan and earned her higher education degrees in Florida (Flagler College) and Indiana (Indiana University). She earned her MFA at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado.

Senior Poetry Editor

A former John and Renee Grisham fellow, Joshua Davis (he/him) holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi, an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, and an M.A. from Pittsburg State University. Recent poems have appeared in The Poetry Distillery, The Museum of Americana, and The Midwest Quarterly. He is a doctoral candidate in American Literature at Ohio University, and he lives near Tampa.

Senior Poetry Editor

Amy M. Alvarez is the author of the poetry collection Makeshift Altar and the co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her poetry has appeared in nationally and internationally recognized literary journals including Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, VCCA, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Amy was born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents. She currently lives and teaches in West Virginia. 

senior poetry editor

R.B. Simon (she/her) is a queer, disabled black writer who has been writing poetry since teenage angst first hit at age eleven (but sincerely hopes it has improved with age.) She has been published in multiple journals, among them Stoneboat Literary Journal, pacificREVIEW, The Coop: A Poetry Collective, Burrow Press Review, Strange Horizons, Literary Mama, Obsidian, and CALYX. Her chapbook The Good Truth (Finishing Line Press, July 2021) was a Finalist in the WI Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Contest. Her full-length collection, Not Just the Fire, was released in March 2023 from Cornerstone Press. In her free time, she enjoys creating visual art, napping, and coffee-flavored caffeine. She is currently living in Madison, WI, with her spouse, newborn daughter, and several unruly little dogs.

Senior Competitions Editor

S.M. Badawi is an Arab American writer and teacher whose words appear or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Diode, Orange Blossom Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Find her on twitter @smbadawi

Competitions Editor

Victoria Buitron is an award-winning writer who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, SmokeLong en Español, Southwest Review, The Acentos Review, and other literary magazines. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, was the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner and is available wherever books are sold. A VONA fellow, her work was selected for 2022’s Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. In 2023, she received the Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.

Reviews Senior Editor

Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem "Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021). https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/susan_kay_anderson

Art director

Diana Baltag is a visual artist based in Romania. She graduated at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, studying Graphic Arts MA. Applying different media, including aquarelle, pressed plants and paper, her work centers around the objects she is collecting. She loves to pay attention to the small things and this gives a deep feeling of sensitivity to her work.

Poetry editor

Shelia Cooper received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She also holds an MA in English and African American literature. A born educator, Shelia taught literature, writing and creative writing at Bennett College and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, North Carolina for the past eleven years combined. She recently moved to Dacula, Georgia with her husband and daughter, where she is currently working on her first collection of poetry. In her poetry, she examines themes of marriage, domestic violence, parenthood and mental illness. She is a firm believer that writing poetry can be used as a mechanism to heal trauma and build community.

Poetry editor

Ashley Steineger (she/her) is a poet and crisis counselor who believes poetry is the language of healing. She is the author of the chapbook Ebb/Flow (Blanket Sea Press, 2021), and her poetry has appeared in Palette Poetry, The Shore, and The Mantle, among others. Ashley received her MFA from Queen’s University of Charlotte. She currently lives and writes out of Raleigh, NC, where she enjoys forest bathing, collecting tattoos, and untranslatable words. For more information visit www.ashleysteineger.com.

Poetry Reader

MT Vallarta (they/them) is a poet and researcher at Dartmouth College. A Kundiman Fellow and Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc. Fellow, their first poetry collection, What You Refuse to Remember (forthcoming October 2023) won the 2022 Harbor Editions Laureate Prize. They received their Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside.

Poetry Reader

Jennifer Shikes Haines (she/her) is a long-time educator originally from NYC, and who currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI. She greatly enjoys mentoring other emerging poets and volunteering in a variety of poetry spaces, including InSurreal Lifeand Youth Arts Alliance. She is published in Spoonie Journal: A Creative Publication for and  by Chronically Ill, and Neurodivergent People, Spoonie Press Online and Mindful Poetry Moments, 4th edition and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

Poetry Reader

A.R. Arthur is a Black Mixed-race poet & writer who has spent most of his life in Kuwait jostling between the UK & America. Anthony's work has been published over 260 times internationally. Anthony's Reviews have been published, or are forthcoming over 80 times internationally. Anthony's Flash Fiction was shortlisted and received an honourable mention in the 2022 The Dillydoun Flash Fiction Prize Competition. Anthony has 3 published chapbooks titled 'The Great Northern Journey' 2020 (Lazy Adventurer Publishing) & 'Vultures' 2021 (Roaring Junior Press) as well as a novel 'The Sands of Change' 2021 (Alien Buddha Press). Anthony's Chapbook 'Half Bred' was the Winner of the 2021 'The Poetry Question' Chapbook contest. Anthony writes for Psychopomp and Reviews at The Poetry Question. Anthony is the EIC of Fahmidan Journal/Publishing & Co and Reviews Editor at Full House Literary. Twitter/Instagram: @ararthurwriter https://ararthurwriter.wordpress.com/

Editor-in-Chief emeritus and Critique editor

Gregory Stapp (he/him) received his BA in Creative Writing from the University of Oklahoma where he worked for the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives, earned a Puterbaugh Fellowship in World Literature, and won the Tomas Rivera Student Writing prize in Poetry. He received his MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and his poems have appeared or are pending publication in Lime Hawk Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Forage, The Cortland Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, and The Southern Review, among others.

IN LOVING MEMORY

Cameron Morse (he/him) holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lived with his wife and three children. He authored ten collections of poetry and his first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. In memoriam, please consider donating to his family. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-morse-family-in-their-time-of-need?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

 

Mission Statement

Harbor Review is an online space for poetry, audio, and art. We are a feminist journal: we believe women's rights are human rights, abortion is essential healthcare and an essential human right, and all people deserve equal protection under the law. Our goal is to address gender parity and marginalization in publishing. We are committed to giving diverse voices a home and amplifying the reach of our contributors by providing a forum for conversations between the work of both new and experienced artists and poets.

We publish work that ranges from personal inquiry into forgotten bodies to work that straddles social margins as the “other” and investigates contemporary social problems. Our issues do not display a broadside of incongruous poems side by side, rather, each issue is a carefully-curated dialogue between poet, content, art, and sound. Many readers and contributors of Harbor Review adore the audio recordings of poets reading their own work and find this a unique and immersive experience in a digital world. 

Harbor Review’s audience is international because of our diverse contributors and masthead. Audiences come to interact with Harbor Review issues. We welcome readers to read, listen, and enjoy a wholly unique creative experience.