TONY BURNETT
Executive Director
Educated at University of North Texas, Tony Burnett (Board Treasurer) is Managing Editor at Kallisto Gaia Press, home of The Ocotillo Review and The Texas Poetry Calendar. An award winning poet, journalist, activist and songwriter, his poetry and short fiction have been published in literary magazines and anthologies including, Sixfold, Connotation Press, Short Story America, Frontier Tales, Texas Poetry Calendar, Poetry @ Round Top anthology, Tidal Basin Review, Di-verse-city and Toucan Literary Magazine. He is the former Editor in Chief of Scribe, the on-line blog with over 6000 subscribers and served as Board President of the Writers’ League of Texas from 2013 through 2017. He makes his home in rural central Texas with his trophy wife, Robin. His hobbies include poking wasp nests with short sticks and wandering aimlessly about.
JOSEPH BORDEN
DIRECTOR
Joseph W. Borden graduated from Tusculum University with a degree in Creative Writing. He is an Editor at Clay Stafford Books and Managing Editor of Killer Nashville Magazine. He also helps organize the Killer Nashville Writers’ Conference. He previously served as Managing Editor of The Tusculum Review. He is an award-winning fiction writer, scriptwriter, and poet. He lives in Tennessee where he spends his free time reading, writing, and riding his motorcycle.
ANDREA BARBOSA
DIRECTOR
Award-winning novelist and poet Andrea Barbosa is an avid reader, soccer fanatic, and a tourist at heart who studied Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.
In addition to her work as a writer for Yahoo Contributor Network she has worked in public relations for an international jewelry company in Brazil, as a tour guide for Space Center Houston, and as a medical interpreter for major hospitals before joining the corporate world. These fine places introduced her to new people, big ideas, and global concepts that helped shape the writer she is today. When not writing or working her full-time job, she travels in search of history, museums, and tourist attractions. She has published two novels and a poetry collection, and her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and in the Southern Pacific Review. Her poetry collection, Holes in Space, won the 2015 Reader’s Favorite Silver Medal and her Flash Fiction piece, The Queen of Carnival, won the 2016 Spider’s Web Prize from Spider Road Press. She has earned other accolades in Flash Fiction and Mystery.
Her work has been influenced by contemporary authors Paulo Coelho, Fernando Sabino, Sylvia Plath, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates, among others. She recently served as VP and Press Director for the Houston Writers Guild.
A. R. (RUSSELL) ASHWORTH
BOARD PRESIDENT
Russell Ashworth is the author of the Elaine Hope series of mystery novels, published by Crooked Lane Books. His first novel, SOULS OF MEN, was released in April, 2017. The second novel in the series, TWO-FACED, was released in July, 2018. He lives in Austin, Texas.
JERICA GLOVER
BOARD SECRETARY
Jerica Glover reads voraciously across all genres and loves singing and listening to vocally challenging music. In addition to serving as a reader for KGP she works in the outreach department at Temple Public Library. She has read Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” so many times to her children, she can recite it forwards and backwards from memory.
GOGI HALE
BOARD TREASURER
Gogi Hale is a widely published horror and speculative fiction wrier who has been short-listed in the Writer’s Digest Short Story Contest. She’s an active member of the Writers’ League of Texas and former Board President of Kallisto Gaia Press
MARY DAY LONG
BOARD MEMBER
Voracious reader, avid traveler, and passionate observer of the human spectacle, Mary Day Long is drawn to diverse and inventive nonfiction narratives. Because reaching across borders, disciplines, and genres is more important than ever in our fragmented world, she looks to discover and promote writing that, by honoring the individual voice, renders it universal.
Educated as an artist at the University of Texas at Austin, Long, after exhibiting paintings and photographs in Texas and California, has become increasingly engaged with words. She has worked as a technical and nonfiction editor, travel writer and photographer, and website designer. Her current projects include a photographic survey of the Buddhist temples of Bagan, Myanmar.
TATE LEWIS-CARROLL
BOARD MEMBER
Tate Lewis-Carroll (They/Them) is an environmentalist, haikuist, surrealist, and musician. They live on a small farm in central Illinois with their lovely wife, Izzy, surrounded by miles of fields between the nearest small towns.
They graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in 2019 with a double major in Creative Writing and Religious Studies. Their chapbook, What’s Left—forthcoming from Finishing Line Press—is a collection of elegies dedicated to their father who died in 2016. They proudly served as the guest editor for the 2022 Texas Poetry Calendar and as a guest lecturer on haiku around the area. Some of their work appears in Modern Haiku, decmeber magazine, SurVision, Hotel Amerika, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Sulfur Surrealist Jungle among others.
Their passion is poetry, striving to find, learn from, and publish others who share their obsession of honesty in craft.