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Claire LeDoyen is originally from the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia. A 2016 graduate from the Pratt Institute Creative Writing program, Claire interned that year at the performance studies publication Emergency Index at Ugly Duckling Presse. Her work has appeared in publications such as the 2015 Book Bloc: Critical Reactions to Racist Policing, “FORCE/FIELDS” by Perennial Press, SLUG MAG and most recently, the Bureau of Complaint and Boreal Zine. She loves drinkin' beers with the boys and is an amateur historian of Jamaican music.

Claire LeDoyen in her own word: 

"This was my first thinking-feelings around forcefields - bodies within those fields, the page as a field as well. In some of the more spatially designed work, I followed my intuition discovering the words on the page as I wrote them, as if it was an archeological work that was waiting to be unearthed beneath the blank page. “It all” was originally written in a dance studio, documenting the words that came along as I moved freely across the space, how I felt was necessary to dance next. One can interpret this piece somewhat similarly to Tatsumi Hijikata’s choreographical notes in Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Two more huge written influences on me are Jeanne Achterberg’s “Imagery in Healing: Shamanism in Modern Medicine” and Bernard Stiegler’s “For A New Critique of Political Economy.” The former showed me the necessity of visualization and psychic awareness, the latter dictated to me how psychic, or tertiary, retention functions within socio-economical fields. 

 "I trust my intuition highly. These poems exist in a space outside of or maybe inhabiting simultaneously the past, present and future. A space requiring divination. A space for me to comfortably inhabit along with spirits. The words are spirits, or rather bodies, within the field. The words have auras and the pieces themselves have an aura made of up those radiuses. These are the mechanics - bodies of force within the expanse of a field, or the page. 

My poetry hero, maybe an anti-hero, I always seem to return to Charles Bukowski. Shrug."

Join us for an evening of readings from Cathy Barber and Deborah Derrickson Kossmann.

Cathy Barber’s poetry has been published across four continents, including in Stone Poetry Quarterly, Belt Magazine and The Hopper, and has been anthologized many times. She is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and makes her home in Cleveland Heights, where she serves on the board of Literary Cleveland. Once: A Golden Shovel Collection (Kelsay Books, 2023).

About Once: A Golden Shovel Collection (Kelsay Books)

"Barber’s seamless poems make the difficult golden shovel form seem easy. Lines from Dickinson, Bashō, and Millay mingle with the words of Trinidad, Wright, and Brainard in this eclectic memoir-montage. As the words of beloved writers coil to shape Barber’s right margins, we are shown rather than told that reading and writing are inseparable and that poetry is a vital resource to understand and endure the inevitable changes of what we love—cities, bodies, even television shows—in an increasingly vulnerable natural world. Good-humored and graceful, Once reminds us that poetry, like a satisfying life, is not written alone nor in one direction." - Elizabeth Savage, Poetry Editor, Kestrel

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann won Trio House Press's inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award for LOST FOUND KEPT: A MEMOIR (January 2025). Her essays, feature articles and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Nashville Review, Memoir Monday, and Psychotherapy Networker to name a few. Deb is a clinical psychologist who lives in Havertown, PA. For more info: lostfoundkept.com

About Lost Found Kept (Trio House Press):

How does a psychologist fail to recognize that her intelligent, sensitive, and book-loving mother has created "the worst hoarder house ever seen?" After making the horrifying discovery that her mother had no water in her house for at least two years, Deborah Derrickson Kossmann begins the otherworldly excavation of a childhood home she hasn't been inside for three decades.

Moving back and forth in time, from this surreal nightmare of an archaeological dig to recollecting her past and long buried family secrets, Kossmann seeks to untangle a web of complicated familial relationships. In her lyrical and unflinching quest, she comes to understand what's been lost, what's been found and what's been kept in both her own and her mother's life.

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