Recently, I had the honor of being interviewed for Elizabeth Bruce’s and Michael Oliver’s Creativists in Dialogue.
Creativists in Dialogue delves into the creative processes of poets and writers.
Here is a link to that interview
Thank you Elizabeth and Michael.
In Fall 2026, Al di là del mare /Across the Sea: Contemporary Italian and Italian-American Poetry will be published by Bordighera Press. The book, for which I served as editor, is a bilingual poetry collection featuring eight Italian poets and eight Italian-American poets, each presented in both Italian and English.
On May 19, I had the opportunity to appear with two of the American poets, Rose Solari and Chloe Yelena Miller, on Grace Cavalieri’s Poet and the Poem at the Library of Congress.
Here is the link to the podcast.
Stay tuned for publication information and for future events.
America’s Slide Towards Authoritarianism, which includes my visual poem, “The T$n Kam&m$ants,” is a is a finalist in the Indie Book Awards 2026.
Congratulations to editors Tom Block, Lisa Zammit and Emily Mercer.
America’s Slide Toward Authoritarianism can be purchased at Amazon or our favorite online store.
‘Michael Palma, this year’s 30 for 30 judge, has chosen Ann Ritter’s “After” as this years best 30 for 30 poem.
Congratulations to Ann for a fine poem!
Here are Michael Palma’s comments on “After”:
The writing is clean, the imagery is vivid, the presentation is unified, the theme is clear without being blatantly stated, and the effect is serious and powerful.
You can read Ann’s poem here.
Ann will be receiving a one hear subscription to Potomac Review.
All of this year’s poems were read anonymously by our judge.
Thanks to all those who participated in this year’s 30 for 30. Your contributions and your interpretations of Suddenly, a flower in a snowfield were all unique and intriguing.
And thanks to Michael Palma for judging this year’s entries.
And a special thank you to the editors of Potomac Review for continually sponsoring this little endeavor.
Until next year…
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
Flowers in Falling Snow
I remember my mother’s plastic flowers.
In winter, yellow forsythia stood
beside spider plants, pale green ghosts
that sprawled to touch weak sun
before the sky turned and flakes fell
onto toy-strewn lawns.
In spring, forsythia outdoors
brought color to the leaden world,
quickened my morning shuffle.
Mother offered me sprigs of yellow,
star-shaped plastic from the attic,
to brighten up my dorm room.
But I said no.
Now unfallen snow weighs the swollen sky down.
I feel it fall on my raw, ungloved hands.
Soon, soon, it will fall.
I turn back to see silk flowers,
bright in my neighbor’s yard. A flower
is a flower in falling snow.
Copyright 2026 Marianne Szlyk
Bio:
Marianne Szlyk is writing poetry again. Three of her new poems have appeared in ArLiJo or Arlington Literary Journal. Her latest poetry book is Why We Never Visited the Elms.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
WYOMING SPRING
Suddenly, a flower in a snowfield
rises from Mother Earth.
After long winter sleep, cub follows
brother and mother out of den womb.
They walk forever.
Will they ever eat again?
But Mama’s steady gait assures her
change is going to come.
Finally they reach a mountain stream.
Other grizzlies are already in the river.
Mama slaps swimming salmon out of
waters to brother and her.
She thanks both mothers.
Eats.
Copyright 2026 Carl Stilwell
Bio:
Carl Stilwell is a retired teacher who taught for over 30 years in the Los Angeles Unified school District. He was born during the depression in Oklahoma and came to California in 1959 and has lived there ever since.He has poems published in Altadena Poetry Review, Blue Collar Review, Four Feather’s Press, Lummox, Pearl, Prism, Revolutionary Poets Brigade–Los Angeles, Rise Up, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, The Sparring Artists, and TheNewVerse.News.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
To preserve formatting, this poem has been saved as a PDF. Please click on the link below to access it:
Bio:
Jay is a queer Southern, Quaker writer in Charlottesville, VA, by way of DC and Atlanta, and Birmingham, Alabama, where he was born and raised in a blue-collar family. He is the first in his family to graduate college and has been published here and there. He and his wife of four months, Sarah, live in Charlottesville. He recommends the lime-cilantro bagel.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
Meditation on an Erratic April
She is gold among a chaos of white. The soft cheek
pressed against an unkind season. The bobbing head
of laughter, when just days ago, she was buried by
the callous hands of winter. See how she’s shattered
its platelets, flaunts an audacious stole of snow?
She pokes her tongue out at the world. Extends
her arms—still tender from the pangs of birthing herself—
swings her narrow hips to jazz she’s created from the wind.
She has swallowed the promise of better days among
exhales of sleet and glacier—she, both perennial and
contradiction, invitation and poison, an armor of sepal
and a triumph of fragile edges. She has become both
taunt and a contagious smile. Opaque and lutescent,
both silence and the rustle of manifest. Jonquil.
Narcissus. Daffodil. Both Goddess and a prayer.
Copyright 2026, Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt
Bio:
Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, M.Ed., is a disabled GenX poet of Lebanese and Sicilian descent whose poetry has appeared since the early 1990s in journals including Frogpond, Southern Quill, BigCityLit, Haiku Canada, Panoply, North of Oxford, ONE ART, Miracle Monocle, dozens of anthologies, and other publications. The author of 14 books—including a Silver Award winner from the Nonfiction Authors Association, an Amazon bestseller, a BookFest first place modern poetry award winner, and a Library of Virginia Literary Awards nominated collection—Gotthardt has also received honors from the Poetry Society of Virginia, Virginia Writers Club, Loudoun County Libraries, and Prince William Arts Council. Her poetry was selected for the City of Manassas’ 150th anniversary time capsule and featured in the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont’s Poetry Walk.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
Here is a new review by John Nicolay of my novella The Appointment as both a document:
https://mikemaggio.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/The-Appointment-by-Mike-Maggio.docx
and a video:
In fact, Nicolay’s review is more than summary or evaluation of the novella. It is an analysis that delves deep into its Kafkaesque and absurdist roots.
Copies of The Appointment can be purchased directly from Vine Leaves Press
or signed copies directly from me
Revelations
I didn’t know what I didn’t know…until I did
No one ever told me that in a cluttered room scattered with poems half-hatched, barely breathing, I would be soothed by the wind rattling the windows.
No one told me I would get high on Anna Akhmatova and Andrew Marvell, or that seeing Adrienne Rich in her later years reading at MIT would bring me such devastating joy. No one told me that poetry would earn me a living (it doesn’t), but it has certainly earned me a life.
No one ever told me that love is love is love, though Gertrude did say a rose is a rose is a rose, a revelation! No one told me I would find home where I was taught I’d be damned. That I would get to be a wife and have a wife!
No one ever told me I’d have no faith in bulbs and that I would be the doubting Thomas of gardeners, that I wouldn’t believe that the ungainly Amaryllis bulb could produce her red-velvety yaw of a blossom…until she did.
Nobody ever warned me about the art of losing, which I have had to practice, but I hope to never have to master.
No one told me that Faith hasn’t a leg to stand on. And Hope, that thing with Emily’s feathers, has gone the way of predictable weather. And Charity? Well it is a data-driven fact that the have-nots give to others in greater measure than the haves.
Then one day I took my jaded self to see the Jade Buddha, several stories high that traveled from Thailand to a Worcester, Mass. parking lot a stone’s throw from car-dealership-row in a city once touted as “The Paris of the 80s” yet more aptly referred to as “Wormtown.”
To this temporary temple came devotees of all ages to honor with humble offerings of what they had. And in the presence of such faith that no one could have convinced me existed, I learned to trust the seed and the bulb and the kernel of love that is left when all else fails.
Copyright 2026 Emily Ferrara
Bio:
Emily Ferrara is the author of The Alchemy of Grief, which won the Bordighera Poetry Prize and was published in a bilingual edition (English and Italian) by Bordighera Press. She lives in Lowell, MA with her wife and their 9-year-old Snorkie.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
