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Join The
Smoking Poet on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook and also on Goodreads to meet the editors, other writers, and be the first in the know about TSP
updates!
Zinta Aistars, TSP’s founder and editor-in-chief, is the published author of three books. She is a publications editor
and writer for a health care organization in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was an editor and writer for LuxEsto
(for which she still freelances), the Kalamazoo College alumni magazine for seven years prior to that. Her work has also appeared in the Kalamazoo Guide, Greater Guide of Southwest Michigan, Southwest Michigan Living, Kindred Spirits Magazine, Kalamazoo Gazette, County Wide News, Encore, Welcome Home, Parade of Homes, the Latvian newspaper Laiks, and the Latvian literary periodical, Jauna Gaita. She has published poetry, travel essays, stories, and articles in the United States,
Latvia, England, Sweden, Germany, and Australia. Her work also appears on many ezines — including
Xelas Magazine, Impact Times, Gently Read Literature, Cezanne’s Carrot, Amsterdam Scriptum, Boston Literary Magazine, Outsider Ink, The Sidewalk’s End, Ghoti Fish, Menda City Review, Megaera Magazine, T-Zero, Fiction Attic, Saucy Vox, Ash Canyon Review, ThothWeb, Flash Me Magazine, Spoiled Ink, 63 Channels, Her Circle Ezine, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, The Redbridge Review, River Walk Journal, Flashquake, milk magazine, The Surface, BookCrossing, Serene Light, Word Riot, Burning Word, The Moon, insolent rudder, Bobbing Around, coilMagazine, Poems Niederngasse, The Paper, Poetry Life & Times, QuietPoly
Writer’s Magazine, Midwest Book Review, Write Sight and others. Zinta is also poetry editor at Her Circle Ezine and on the editorial board of insolent rudder. Zinta also does media work for the Stulberg International Competition.
Join
Zinta and read her work on her Web site, MySpace, Facebook and at her blog. Or, tweet Zinta on Twitter.
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Bonnie Jo Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm with her mother and four siblings in a house her grandfather Herlihy built in the shape
of an H. She learned to castrate small pigs, milk Jersey cows, and, when she
was snowed in with chocolate, butter, and vanilla, to make remarkable chocolate candy.
When she left home for the University of Chicago to study philosophy, her mother rented out her room. She
has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the Ringling Bros
and Barnum & Bailey Circus selling snow cones. As president of Goulash Tours Inc., she has organized and led adventure
tours in Russia and the Baltics, and all the way south to Romania and Bulgaria.
Her collection Women & Other Animals details the lives of extraordinary females in rural and small town Michigan, and it won the AWP prize for short fiction;
her story “The Smallest Man in the World” has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her novel Q Road investigates the lives of a rural community where development pressures are bringing unwelcome change in the character
of the land. Her new short fiction collection, American Salvage, consists of fourteen lush and rowdy stories of folks who are struggling to make sense of the twenty-first century.
For decades, Campbell has put together a personal newsletter The Letter Parade, and she currently practices
Koburyu kobudo weapons training. She received her M.A. in mathematics and her M.F.A. in writing from Western Michigan University.
She now lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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Lorena
Audra Rutens, our new “A Good Cause” editor, developed and maintained oversight of Chicagoland Community
Organizations Active in Disaster (CCOAD), a coalition of Chicago’s largest and most influential nonprofit organizations and government agencies.
In response to the Midwest flood of 2008, and per the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Lorena rapidly mobilized the CCOAD to provide services to elderly
and disadvantaged families suffering from a wide range of long term recovery issues and property damage. While working within
Heartland Human Care Services, Inc., a partner of Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, she was asked to serve as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regarding the role community agencies
should have in public health security policy.
The Federal Reserve Bank recently sponsored Lorena to attend the National Conference of Corporate Community
Investment. Following the conference, she was invited to participate in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 2009 disaster preparedness tabletop exercise in Washington D.C. to train alongside leaders from the public
sector and Fortune 500 companies.
Lorena has coordinated business continuity planning seminars for nonprofit and government leadership; introduced
individualized education plans to youth homes in a developing country; and created job training programs for underserved youth
in Denver, Colorado. She has advocated for defendant rights during her undergraduate internship within the Leon County Public
Defender’s Office in Tallahassee, Florida. She has also worked within the Florida House of Representatives on the Education
Council and assisted State Representatives in the creation of legislation.
One of Lorena's proudest accomplishments was her year of service with AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps during which she not only proudly served her country, but lobbied and presented to numerous
city and county officials and business leaders the merits of social service programming. Because of her outstanding academic
achievements while completing her Master’s in Social Work, she was nominated to the highest honor societies, Phi Kappa
Phi and Phi Alpha. Rutens has studied internationally and analyzed social welfare issues and institutions in the Czech Republic,
Poland, Germany, Latvia, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago. She has served on numerous volunteer committees and traveled to
over 15 countries.
Lorena's published work appears on Voices From the Field, National Resource Center on Advancing Emergency Preparedness for Culturally Diverse Communities.
Give Lorena a Tweet.
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Skye Leslie, TSP’s new assistant
editor, is a poet, essayist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. Skye has made
writing a habit for over forty years. As a retreat leader, she has taught the
art of journaling, poetry and led writing workshops for survivors of domestic violence.
Because of extensive travel in foreign countries, Skye is fascinated by the stories which develop out of diverse cultural
experience with a particular interest in the stories of women. She is currently
at work on a series of essays with the working title of “My Story as Told by Hair,” and a novel with working title
of Prisoners of War, a creative nonfiction work based on WWII, the return of American
soldiers and the Japanese internment camps in the United States. She has also
written two books on writing in the retreat experience for which she is seeking publication.
Skye has been a student of Tom Spanbauer and his "Dangerous Writers," is a member of Portland's Writers'
Dojo, Ken Arnold's Buzzaroonies, Cross River Writers, Portland Literary Arts and also posts on Open Salon. This summer she will spend eight days studying at the Fishtrap writers’ retreat.
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Feedback, submissions, ideas? Email thesmokingpoet@gmail.com
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