Staff & Board

Nickole Brown  is the author of  Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries.  Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals.  To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a  chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.  She first attended the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in 2004 and returned nearly every year thereafter as either a participant or mentor. In 2021, she began envisioning the future of the festival with founder Miles Coon and became President in 2022. Not too long after, she renamed it the Hellbender Gathering of Poets after an Eastern Hellbender named Meatloaf that she fell in love with while volunteering at the Western North Carolina Nature Center. You can visit her personal website here.

Jennifer Coon is an Art Therapist and Psychologist, working and living in the Boston area. She was inspired into poetry by her father, Miles Coon, who founded the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Relatively new to writing poetry, she attended the Palm Beach Poetry Festival as a participant for the first time in 2017.  In addition, she served on its board for over 15 years.  Her work has been published in the South Florida Poetry Journal.  

Alison Granucci is a poet and naturalist living in the Hudson Valley. In 2005, she founded Blue Flower Arts, the first literary speaker’s agency in this country to represent poets, and for fifteen years worked with some of the most acclaimed poets in the country for their appearances. During that time, she also curated several Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers Conferences at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Upon retiring in 2020, Alison began to write poetry herself—much to her surprise and delight. Her work is now published or forthcoming in RHINO, Terrain.org, About Place Journal, EcoTheo Review, Plant-Human Quarterly, Subnivean Journal (Poetry Award finalist), Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Great River Review, The Dewdrop, and an anthology of bird poems, Little by Little, the Bird Builds Its Nest, by Paris Morning Publications. Alison’s awards include an Artist-in-residence at Trail Wood, homestead of naturalist Edwin Way Teale (2023), and the first annual Vicious Circle Award from The Poetry Society of New York (2022) for her contributions to the world of poetry. She currently serves as a reader for The Rumpus and is at work on a full-length poetry collection. You can visit her personal website here.

James Lenfestey has published thirteen volumes of poems, essays, anthologies, and a memoir. He had a long and thriving career in  academia, marketing, communications, and journalism. He was on the editorial board of the StarTribune, where he won several Page One awards for excellence. For fifteen years, he chaired the Literary Witnesses poetry program in Minneapolis  and led a summer poetry class on Mackinac Island, Michigan. In 2020 he received the Kay Sexton Award for significant contributions and leadership in the Minnesota Literary Community. In 2024, Milkweed Editions will publish his eighth poetry collection, Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements.  He lives in Minneapolis with his wife. They have four children and ten grandchildren. You can visit his personal website here.

Marie Kressin is an MFA candidate at the Sewanee School of Letters. She currently supports her habit of paying rent by writing full-time for SchoolCEO, a local education magazine. Marie has also worked as a high school English teacher and an English-speaking teaching assistant in Kuopio, Finland. Other than the one year she lived in Finland, she’s lived her entire life in Arkansas, molded by the Ozark mountains and the Arkansas river valley. Her husband is a psychiatrist-in-training, and they have a shared dream of building a garden big enough to grow most of their own food. For now, they settle happily for the tomatoes and okra growing in their small backyard.