Valerie Sonnenthal has been writing poetry since she was 12. She joined the Cleaveland House Poets after moving to the Island in 2005. She is a contributor to the MV Times, owns Peaked Hill Studio where she teaches healing yoga and offers Sound Healing. Her poems have been published in Rattle, New Verse News, WCAI, and the MV Times. Valerie lives with her husband, photographer Ed Grazda, and her younger son and their two pandemic pups.

Rachel Elion Baird was raised in San Francisco on the pabulum of the west coast literary and art renaissance. Offering up poetry as a language of shared experience, Baird’s poems are ecstatic, confessional, and often visual, unfolding stories through descriptive imagery. She is a writer, artist, poet and singer/songwriter whose work appears in numerous publications including New Millennium Writings, South Light, Deluge Journal and Into the Void, as well as in experimental film and multi-media installations. Baird is a member of the Edinburgh School of Poets and the author of two published poetry collections: Uplands, and Valentines and other Tragedies. She has wintered over on the Vineyard most years since 2002 and until recently was a year-round resident.

Holly St. John Bergon has published poems in The Sewanee Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Ploughshares, Terra Nova, College English, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and elsewhere. With her husband Frank Bergon, she has published translations of the Spanish poets Antonio Gamaneda, José Ovejero, Xavier Queipo, and Violeta C. Rangel in New European Poets and The European Constitution in Verse. For many years, she taught courses in English composition, modern poetry, and creative writing at the State University of New York-Dutchess Community College. She lives in Oak Bluffs.

Ingrid Goff-Maidoff is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and inspiration, as well as a beautiful line of cards and gifts. She and her husband live in a house they built in the woods, surrounded by trails, fields and family, where they raised two daughters. Ingrid's work is available on her website, through her popular e-newsletter, Tending Joy, in bookstores and galleries across the country and at her own West Tisbury shop by the great beetlebung tree in West Tisbury.

Ellen Martin Story is a poet and otherwise creative type. She is a member of the Cleaveland House Poets and the VH Library Poetry Readers. Her work has been published in the MV Times, in the 2021 Cleaveland House Poets anthology, In the Company of Poets and at a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Conservation exhibit at Featherstone Center for the Arts. She has participated in many poetry readings, zoom and live, including for Featherstone Center for the Arts, Pathways Arts, MV Museum, and MV Playhouse. Ellen is happily retired from a career in H.R. Administration, lives with her husband in Oak Bluffs and is working on her first chapbook poetry manuscript.