Literary Poets
Susan Thurston
Susan Thurston is a writer, educator, and professional communicator whose work has been published frequently including in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review, Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, Minnesota Monthly, Fox Cry Review, Rag Mag; several anthologies including Open to Interpretation: At Water’s Edge (Taylor & O’Neill, 2012), Low Down and Coming On (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010), Tremors Vibrations Enough to Rearrange the World (Heywood Press, 1995); and the chapbook Wild Bone Season (Heywood Press, 1996).
Mark Conway
Mark Conway is the author of three poetry collections: rivers of the driftless region, (Four Way Books, 2019), Dreaming Man, Face Down (Dream Horse Press, 2010), and Any Holy City (Silverfish Review Press, 2005) and a chapbook, First Body, (Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2004).
Nicole Borg
Nicole Borg is an English teacher and poet. All Roads Lead Home, Nicole’s first collection of poetry, was published in 2018 by Up on Big Rock Poetry Series an imprint of Shipwreckt Books. For five years, she was editor of Green Blade, Magazine of the Rural America Writers’ Center. She lives in Sartell along the lovely Mississippi River with her husband and sons, Lyzander and Lynx.
Susan Sink
Susan Sink is a poet and writer living on 80 acres in St. Joseph, Minnesota. She is the author of three books of poems, The Way of All the Earth, Habits, and H is for Harry. Her poems and stories have been published in national literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago Review, Santa Monica Review, Spoon River Anthology and others.
Bill Meissner
Author and teacher Bill Meissner has won numerous awards for his writing, including PEN/NEA Syndicated Fiction Awards and The Midwest Book Award. He is the author of three books of fiction and five books of poetry, most recently The Mapmaker’s Dream.
Micki Blenkush
Micki Blenkush lives in St. Cloud, MN and works as a social worker. She was selected as a 2017-2018 fellow in poetry for the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program and was a 2015 recipient of an Emerging Artist Grant awarded by the Central MN Arts Board.
Mara Faulkner OSB
Mara Faulkner, OSB is retired Associate Professor of English at the College of St. Benedict and now teaches writing workshops at The Spirituality Center of Saint Benedict’s Monastery, where she lives. She is the author of the poetry collection Still Birth, and the academic books Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen and Born of Common Hungers: Benedictine Women in Search of Connections. Her memoir Going Blind (Suny Press) was a 2010 Minnesota Book Award Finalist.
Brendan D. King
Brendan D. King brings his knowledge of poetic forms together with his understanding of history, culture, and several languages, to access the ancient power of incantatory language. He aims to bring the past and the future into the now, to amplify whatever, in the meaning of our times, is also present in the meaning of all of history’s important moments. He affiliates with the New Formalism school of poetry, and has been frequently published in the Saint Austin Review, the premier international journal of Catholic culture, literature, and ideas. He lives in Stearns County, Minnesota.