The HIVE has these B’s inside….

William Ward Butler is a writer and educator from Northern California. He is the author of the chapbook Life History published by Ghost City Press and his poems have appeared in Assaracus, Bodega Magazine, Hobart, and other journals. He is a poetry reader for the Adroit Journal and has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Catamaran Writing Conference, and the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods.


Danusha Laméris is the 2019-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz and a graduate of UCSC where she studied Studio Art. Her book The Moons of August was the winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, and her new book, Bonfire Opera, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020. Her work has appeared in: Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The SUN, and Tin House.

Julie Murphy fell in love with poetry as a child. Her favorites, “The Mitten Song” and “At the Seaside”, sparked open wonder in a post-Sputnik milieu generally void of curious musings. As a “grown-up”, reading and writing poetry carries her from the known into the unknown and keeps her close to the truths of life. A longtime counseling psychology professor and psychotherapist, Julie developed Embodied Writing™, a somatic approach to creative writing, and teaches poetry, as a volunteer, at Salinas Valley State Prison. Julie is a founding board member for the Right to Write Press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2019, CALYX Journal, Common Ground Review, Louisville Review, The Red Wheelbarrow, and The Alembic, among other journals. Julie lives in Santa Cruz, California. She still thinks there is little better than being laid low by a good poem.

Dion O’Reilly’s first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her poems and essays appear in Narrative, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. She teaches poetry workshops in a house full of wild art situated in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where she lives with her husband and a baleful parrot.

Lisa Allen Ortiz grew up in Northern California and now lives in Santa Cruz. Her book Guide to the Exhibit won the 2016 Perugia Press Prize, and her poems and translations have appeared in Colorado Review, The Literary Review, Zyzzyva, Narrative Magazine and been featured on Verse Daily and Best New Poets. She likes lettuce, bathtubs, bees and other astonishing items found on planet earth.