Congratulations to the 20 writers who made it to the finalist round of our 2023 SASFest Poetry Contest. Their contest entries will be published in our anthology, New Poetry From the Festival 2023.

Kathleen Archambeau is a longtime LGBTQ activist. She began as a poet, studying with Adrienne Rich and Derek Walcott. Her nonfiction works include Climbing the Corporate Ladder in High Heels, “Seized,” in The Other Woman, edited by Victoria Zackheim,  Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes, and We Make It Better: The LGBTQ Community and Their Positive Contributions to Society with gay dad Eric Rosswood, banned briefly by Target for its queer content. Archambeau currently serves on the Board of the Women’s National Book Association SF Chapter and as an LGBTQ Teaching Elder at the University of San Francisco.

Ian Spencer Bell is a dancer and a poet. He lives in New York City.

Joy Belonger is a white transfeminine writer, educator, and printmaker from Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an instructor and fellow. Previous work has appeared in publications such as Black Warrior Review, Cleaver, TIMBER, Barrelhouse, Nat. Brut, and New Poetry from the Midwest from New American Press. She currently lives in Baltimore, where she teaches English.

Danielle Bero (2023 Runner-Up) was born in Queens to hippie parents, given a dose of Shel Silverstein, Tupac, jazz, and classic rock. Bero is a Posse scholar, taught in Indonesia on a Fulbright, co-founded a school for students in foster care and held it down as a high school principal in Brooklyn. She holds a master’s in English Education, Educational Leadership, and completed her MFA at the University of San Francisco. She is a Jack Straw Fellow and is published in Divine Feminist anthology, Lavender Review, Quiet Lightning, Juked, among others. She has a micro-chapbook “Schooled” published by Ghost City Press. 

Brandon Blue (2023 Runner-Up) is a black, queer poet, French teacher, and MFA candidate at Arizona State University from Washington, DC. He is a reader for Storm Cellar Magazine and his work has or will appear in [PANK], Beyond Queer Words, Lucky Jefferson, and more. His work is also featured in the Capital Pride Poem-a-Day event. His chapbook, Snap.Shot, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Isobel A. Burke (2023 Winner) is an as-of-yet unpublished poet born and raised on Vancouver Island. As far back as they can remember, poetry has been an instrument for them to make sense of the world and give meaning to the parts of life that words fail.

Suri Chan, known for the popular Instagram account, @poemsbysuri, is a queer Asian poet and overthinker. She has been featured in Vocal Spotlight, Arts Help (a United Nations arts initiative), and various anthologies. Suri came in third in the Hammond House Publishing poetry contest in 2022. She was also a winner of the Moleskine “True Colors” Poetry Challenge. Suri will release her first book of poetry, Not Everything Has to Be Empowering, in mid-2023.

Casey Charles lives in Missoula, Montana and Palm Springs, California. He writes across genres. His first book, The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial (2003), was nominated for a Publishing Triangle Award in nonfiction. A collection of essays, Critical Queer Studies: Law, Film, and Fiction in Contemporary America followed in 2012. He is the author of two novels The Trials of Christopher Mann and The Monkey Cages, which appeared from Lethe Press in 2018. He has also published two poetry chapbooks, including Blood Work. A collection of poems entitled Zicatela came out with Foothills Publishing in 2019. His memoir, Undetectable, is forthcoming from Running Wild Press. Charles’s writing draws on his experience as an activist, a trial lawyer, and a researcher.

William Demaree taught writing in community colleges for decades until his 2022 retirement (he prefers the word “reboot”). He hopes to devote his new life to reading (anything and everything), writing (mostly poems and essays about the joys of talking to strangers), train travel (New Orleans is his favorite), and giving back to the queer community. He has been a storyteller at Outspoken in Boystown, Chicago, and has published his work in Radical Faerie Digest.

Iain Grinbergs (2023 Runner-Up) (he/they) is a PhD candidate in English (poetry) at Florida State University and a former middle school reading teacher. He was a semifinalist for Conduit Magazine‘s 2022 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. 

Freesia McKee, the 2022-2023 Poet-in-Residence at Ripon College, writes about the influence of histories on how we experience place. She practices poetry, creative prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Her work has appeared in Foglifter, Tinderbox, Yes Poetry, About Place, and The Ploughshares Blog.

Anya Morgan lives in Seattle with her partner Rowan and their two gaming PCs.  After leaving her legal career to become a middle school teacher, she has a lot more time to write poems in her notes app.

Em Palughi is a poet from Southern Alabama. She is a second year MFA student at Vanderbilt University and her work can be found in Black Warrior Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and Oakland Arts Review. Her poetry reflects her fraught relationship with the Southern landscape, her queer identity, and her family.

James Penha (he/him), an expat New Yorker, has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.

Emily Portillo is a queer poet, mother, and avid over-thinker from the Boston area. She was a poetry finalist in the 2020 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and in the 2022 Poetry International Prize. She is the winner of the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Contest and her work has been published in Rattle Magazine and elsewhere.

Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems. His writing appears in the New York Times, Harvard Review, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Kirkus. He has served as an editor for AGNI, PANK, The Rumpus, and Pleiades, and as a poetry blogger for Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles and in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Jessica Sampley (she/hers) is the author of Tuscaloosa to Tupelo (MSRP, 2007). Her poems have also appeared in Birmingham Arts Journal, Kakalak, and Indy Weekly. Jessica grew up in Arley, Alabama. She now lives in Bon Secour, Alabama, with her beautiful wife, Malinda, and their furbabies. Jessica assists with volleyball, sponsors Equality Club and Verisimilitude (literary arts journal), and serves as the Academies/Career Tech Coordinator at Gulf Shores City Schools.

Hunt Scarritt is the only person to have won both the National Playwrights Conference Award and the Stephen King Writing Fellowship. He is a former Professor of Theatre at Loyola University and has acted in over 100 stage productions and 75 film and television productions. As a writer, he was mentored by Edward Albee and August Wilson. He co-founded Loblolly Theatre which produced 76 world premiere plays, ten by Mr. Scarritt. Hunt has led meditation/creativity/writing workshops at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Groundswell Institute and has just completed writing his first television series, New Orleans Stories, which will begin production in 2023.

T.A. Thomas is a Ph.D. candidate in English with Creative Writing concentration at the University of Southern Mississippi and has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Their creative and critical work appears in Product, Constellations, and elsewhere. Allen lives and writes in Hattiesburg under the supervision of his cat, Lucky.

sami h. tripp is a queer hyphenate who is constantly in awe of the ways science and magic braid together. Influenced by their mixed identities, they are working and writing towards reconnection with ancestors past & present. They are privileged to be learning, creating, and communing with Yokuts land, and their poetry can be found in Bramble Lit Mag and Blue Heron Review.

Finalists are pictured above in alphabetical order, from top,  left to right.

SASFest is grateful to:

Anthology Editor – Jan Edwards Hemming

Publisher – Rebel Satori Press

Cover Artist – Timothy Cummings

Poetry Contest Sponsor SCOVERN LAW

Saints & Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival is a program of the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. Visit sasfest.org for more information about our annual event.