Editors

Chuck Carlise, Director and Editor

Chuck Carlise is the author of the poetry collection, In One Version of the Story (New Issues Poetry & Prose), as well as two chapbooks, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf Poetry Series) and Casual Insomniac (Bateau, “Boom Contest" winner).  He is the recipient of the InPrint/Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize as well as the Academy of American Poets C.T. Wright Award, and his work has garnered a half-dozen Pushcart Prize nominations, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, and inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology in both 2012 and 2014.  He has spoken or read in dozens of venues, including as the Keynote Speaker at the Sigma Tau Delta annual meeting in Hays, Kansas.  His poems and essays appear in Southern Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

Chuck completed his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, after previously earning degrees from Wittenberg University and the University of California at Davis. During these years, he served on the editorial staff of Swan Scythe Poetry Press, and spent two years as nonfiction editor for the journal Gulf Coast.  More recently, he has taught at UC-Santa Cruz, Westminster College, and Grand Valley State University, as well as at the Boldface Writer's Conference and as Poet-in-Residence with Writers in the Schools. Chuck has lived in the four corners of the U.S. and parts beyond, calling 14 different states "home" over the years, as well as keeping an occasional apartment in Sicily.  Outside of academia (and numerous temp positions and dish-dog stints), he spent spent several years in the non-profit sector, primarily as an activist and community organizer in Portland, Oregon.

He is currently at work on a new volume of poems and multiple chapbook projects, as well as a memoir of his years on the Greyhound Bus Lines.  In Fall of 2022, he joined the Ashland University Department of Languages and Literatures, as Assistant Professor of English, teaching undergraduate literature and creative writing, serving on the faculty of the Ashland MFA, and directing the Ashland Poetry Press.

Jennifer Rathbun, Associate Editor

Jennifer Rathbun, poet and translator, is a Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Classics and Interim Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ball State University in Indiana. She received her PhD at the University of Arizona specializing in Contemporary Latin American Literature. Rathbun is the translator of numerous poetry books by Hispanic authors such as Alberto Blanco and Minerva Margarita Villarreal, editor of two anthologies of poetry and author of the poetry collections Precipicio / Precipice (2023) and  El libro de traiciones / The Book of Betrayals (2021).  Rathbun was awarded the 2021 Ambroggio Prize by the Academy of American Poets for her translation of Cardinal in My Window With a Mask on its Beak by Colombian born Latinx author Carlos Aguasaco. She is a member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and is Associate Editor of Ashland Poetry Press.

Past Editors

Richard Snyder, Founding Editor (1969-1986)

Poet, fiction writer, playwright, and Professor of English at Ashland University, Richard Snyder served for fifteen years as English department chair. He is the author of Practicing Our Sighs: The Collected Poetry of Richard Snyder (1989).

Robert McGovern, Founding Editor (1969-1998)

Poet and scholar, Robert McGovern published two books of poems, A Feast of Flesh (974) and Fool: Selected Poems (2001). His critical works include monographs on Louis Coxe, Hollis Summers, and Judson Jerome as well as critical pieces and reviews.  

Joan Baranow (1989-1991)  

Poet and filmmaker Joan Baranow is author of Living Apart (1999) and In the Next Life (2019). She is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and recipient of awards from Marin Arts Council and Ohio Arts Council. With her husband, physician and poet David Watts, she produced the PBS documentaries Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine and The Time We Have.

Stephen Haven (1992-2016) 

Poet and memoirist, Stephen Haven is author of The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (2004), Dust and Bread (2008), The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk (2008), and The Last Sacred Place in North America (2012). He has received awards from the Ohio Arts Council and New American Press.

Poet, novelist, essayist, and scholar, Deborah Fleming is author of poetry collections Migrations (2005), Morning, Winter Solstice (2012), Into a New Country (2016), Source of the River (2018), and Earthrise (2021). Her nonfiction collection, Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio's Natural Landscape (2019) won the PEN-America Diamondstein/Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award in 2020. Her novel Without Leave (2014) won the Asheville Award from Black Mountain Press. She has published two volumes of scholarship and edited two collections of essays on W. B. Yeats.  

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