Our 2025 Editorial Team

We at Bacopa Literary Review are excited to introduce a talented and varied team

Editor in Chief J.N. Fishhawk is a poet and freelance writer. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks and Postcards from the Darklands, ekphrastic poems accompanying artwork by artist Jorge Ibanez. The second book in his and illustrator Johnny Rocket Ibanez’s ongoing World of Whim Sea children’s series is out now. Info at fishhawkandrocket.com.

Managing Editor T. Walters is a writer, artist, musician, and cannabis worker living among the orange trees. Their work appears in Nymeria Publishing’s Descendants of Medusa. They are Managing Editor for Bacopa Literary Review. Tea lives to connect, create, and marvel at nature’s many wonders. 

Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin studied English Literature and French at the University of Florida. She has published humor, short fiction, and personal memoir and spent over 15 years as a freelance editor and teacher of languages.

Fiction Editor Wendy Thornton has been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and many other literary journals and books. Her latest books, Arrested Motion and Hanging On, were published in 2023 and 2024 respectively.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has won many literary awards, and started the Writers Alliance (www.writersalliance.org).

Poetry Co-Editor Oliver Keyhani is a visual and performance artist, poet and writer. He is a member of the Gainesville Fine Arts Association and a founding member of the Carousel of Souls Curiosities Circus Troupe (CoSCCT). His short experimental poem-play “Children of Gaia” has been produced at the Tank Theater in NYC. His hybrid visual-poetry works the “dada manuscripts”: thé avec dada and the book of dada dandies have received international acclaim.

Poetry Co-Editor Grayson May is a poet, playwright, writer, artist and actor. Their work has been published in Colorado Review, Cleveland Book Review, Ponder Review and Z Publishing House, among others. Their lyric play Scripture was recently featured in the Actors Studio Drama School's Repertory Season in NYC. They have a MFA in Playwriting from Pace University and a BFA in Creative Writing with poetry concentration from the University of the Arts.

Poetry Co-Editor Susan Ward Mickelberry is a writer, editor, poet, and long-time yoga teacher. Her poetry collection And Blackberries Grew Wild was published by Roadside Press in 2024. She is a 2024 Pushcart nominee. Poems appear in many publications including This is Poetry: Volume IV: Poets of the South. She participates in regional poetry readings and events, most recently at the Lynx Bookstore and at Civic Media Center’s Poetry Jam.

2024 Bacopa Literary Review Letter From the Editor

By Bacopa Literary Review Editor in Chief J. N. Fishhawk

Our lives flower and pass. Only robust
works of the imagination live in eternity,
Tlaloc, Apollo,
dug out alive from dead cities.

--Denise Levertov, Art (after Gautier)

Liminal spaces, lines of demarcation crossed, boundaries blurred, distinct and sometimes even radically different elements mixed—whether blended consciously and voluntarily or not--to form something new. These are the types of places many of this year’s contributors take us. Bacopa Literary Review 2024 is a creature of its place and time. Like many journals, its “place” is manifold and multi-faceted. Though we are based in North Central Florida as a project of the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, Bacopa contains multitudes. Our contributors hail from all across the United States and all around the world. For many of us in 2024 the times are volatile, to say the least. 

As we assemble this year’s journal we are navigating our way through the murk of a chaotic and uncertain national election, here in the United States. The infinitely worse chaos and uncertainty of war afflicts the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Northeast Africa. Rumors and threats of war well up elsewhere across the globe. Whether we are trying to cross lines of politics and culture, or the shifting, blood-bought, invisible lines of borders on a map, it seems we have no choice but to heed the warning of Hardy Coleman: Whatever else you do, keep moving/ for the placement of stones/ is not set in stone/ ...the current runs swiftly/ and the eddies have teeth.

Amidst all of this uncertainty, these edges colliding--too often brutally--creating shifting, crossover spaces that tend to disappear all too quickly, we may feel with Amanda Faye Martin that nothing is known/ not ourselves/ not the world/ not each other. Whether we are struggling to move through political chaos and economic instability, the immediate mortal threat of existing in a warzone, or merely one more awkward social occasion with people whose politics set our teeth on edge, we may find ourselves tempted to cross our own inner boundaries and engage in the masking and suppression of our true selves to appeal to the expectations and desires of others. 

We see the peril of doing so through the eyes of Wilson Taylor’s masked protagonist as she navigates a simultaneously literal and metaphorical masquerade: He hands me champagne, and the glass feels nice in my hand. So easy to shatter...I feel completely absent, anonymous. Cameron Edrich’s protagonist runs her life aground on the rocks of similar contradictions as she buries her true cultural and personal identity in the name of what passes for love: Of course, change is only possible if there is something worth changing for. Of course, something worth changing for must be either extremely amazing or deeply horrific, and there is never any in-between. The reality, for this character and for so many of us, is that much of the time the world seems to be little more than a jumble of in-betweens.

It’s easy to get lost in liminal spaces. Water, earth, and sky may commingle, become confused as in the fraught winter landscape Christine Pennylegion’s anonymous woman struggles through, trudging steps into whiteness under the answering grey-whiteness above. Richard Laurberg expresses the way the boundaryless spaces of the natural world reflect the perilous crossings of our own inner bogs and fens as the coiled verse of his recipe commands its reader to compound corruptions that/ you make (part, land; part lake). Stefan Malizia reminds us that removed, above, and in control though we may pretend to be, we humans are part and parcel of these melanges, animals commingled among animals as [w]e secret species,/ Dancing, stir the dark and light. Likewise, Marisca Pichette presses us to lift ourselves up and through the mirage of a wall between humans and other beings: Holding a sliver of wilderness doesn't offer me ownership...What I was searching for then is the same thing I look for now: kinship.

It is the task of the artist to attempt to pierce the veils of deception and denial, to deliberately and boldly cross imposed borders of authoritarian dictates in politics, culture, and economy, to try to see around the curves and corners of ever-moving history. Against relentless tides of cynicism, confusion, and despair, to seek, magnify, and give wildly away to whomever come who may the joy of embodied existence, no matter how rare and precious it feels against the profusion of shifting, razor-bound borders. Angela Townsend reminds us: Innocence is a mountain range, and love is a guard dog against the impossible. Though we spend whole calendars’ worth of time and gallons of ink writing out all the ways in which the liminal, the commingled, the unclear edges of reality confuse and scare us, life demands that we face those boundaries. 

Finding our way through the world so often involves either stumbling or being shoved through shadowed margins. The choice to make art, to act on the upwelling wisdom behind the urge to create, can limn those edges golden, no matter how hardened, how knife-edged they may feel. Sarah Salvia shines that light into one of the darkest places a human being can enter, the loss of a child. Remembering watching the waves wash away her dead son’s name where she’d scrawled it in beach sand, she writes: The image of his name being erased so quickly, so completely, makes me realize that a real goodbye will never be possible. I will carry him within me until I, myself, am erased.

Reader, cross this threshold. Turn these pages. Catch the spark. Carry the fire.

~

This is the introductory letter from the Editor in Chief that appeared in the 2024 edition of Bacopa Literary Review. If you would like to purchase this edition, it is available on Amazon in print or Ebook and you can find it here.

About the Editor: Editor in Chief J.N. Fishhawk is a poet and freelance writer. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks and Postcards from the Darklands, ekphrastic poems accompanying artwork by artist Jorge Ibanez. The second book in his and illustrator Johnny Rocket Ibanez’s ongoing World of Whim Sea children’s series is out now. Info at fishhawkandrocket.com.