About Those Losses - James Benger

James Benger has written a bunch of stuff. Some of it has even been published in print and on the interwebs. He is the resident slacker on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, and is the most truant member of the Riverfront Readings Committee. He is also the admin of an online poetry workshop called 365 Poems in 365 Days, which has produced four anthologies and counting. He lives and Kansas City with his wife and children.

Sarah Worrel works as a paraeducator and is a mother, a video gamer, and a bookworm. She co-authored her first and second books of poetry with James Benger: Misfits in the Front Row and Ravenous and Salivating. She also writes short stories that have been published in Coal City Review, James Gunn's Ad Astra, and the anthology The New Normal.

On Halloween 2023, redbat books released Lindsey Martin-Bowen's seventh poetry book, CASHING CHECKS

with Jim Morrison. Her poetry collection, Where Water Meets the Rock (39 WEST PRESS 2017) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, her CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison  (in chapbook form) was a semi-finalist in the QuillsEdge Press 2015-2016 Chapbook Contest., and in 2017, it won

the Kansas Writers Association award, "Looks Like a Million."

   In 2016, Writer's Digest gave her "Vegetable Linguistics" an Honorable Mention in its 85th Annual Contest. Her Inside Virgil's Garage (Chatter House Press 2013) was a runner-up in the 2015 Nelson Poetry Book Award, and a poem from it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. McClatchy Newspapers/The Kansas City Star named her Standing on the Edge of the World (Woodley Press/Washburn University) one of the Ten Top Poetry Books of 2008. It was nominated for a Pen Award.  

   Her poems have run in Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry, New Letters, I-70 Review, Thorny Locust,

Tittynope Zine, Coal City Review, Amethyst Arsenic, Silver Birch

Press, Flint Hills Review, Bare Root Review, The Same, Phantom

Drift, Porter Gulch Review, Rockhurst Review, 21 anthologies, and other literary magazines. She taught at the University of Missouri- Kansas City 18 years, often concurrently at JCCC, MCC -Penn Valley, and MCC-Longview 25 years, and she taught writing, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and American Court Systems (online) for Blue Mountain College in Pendleton, Oregon (2019-2024),. She holds an MA from the University of Missouri and a Juris Doctor degree from the UMKC Law School. While teaching at UMKC and MCCU-Longview, she concurrently taught creative writing, World Literature, and other writing classes at MCCC--Penn Valley for (1993-2005) and Johnson County Community College (1988-2005.)

   In a previous life, she was a full-time newspaper reporter for The Louisville Times (Louisville, Colorado) and for The SUN Newspapers Johnson County, Kansas), an associate editor for Modern Jeweler Magazine and the Editor for The National Paralegal Reporter.