Gumball Poetry - Here we are!

Winter 2024/2025

In the machine: 15 poems, 2 experiments, 12 pieces of art

Poets

(click name for bio)

Lucie Bonvalet

Lucie Bonvalet is a writer, a visual artist and a teacher. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in FENCE, The Brussels Review, Best Small Fictions 2023, SAND, Monkeybicycle, Phantom Drift Limited, Juked, and elsewhere. Originally from the Dordogne in France, she has lived in Portland, Oregon since 2004.

Sharon M. Carter

Sharon M. Carter is a poet and visual artist, retired from a health care career. Published online and in many literary magazines, her books "Quiver," was published in 2022 and "Ekphrastic Pastiche" in 2024. The poem "Who's at My Door?" is from a series using the Queen of Hearts (Louis Carroll) persona.
See more of Sharon's work at www.sharonmcarter.com.

Brittney Corrigan

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age (JackLeg Press, 2023). Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. Her debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, is forthcoming from Middle Creek Publishing in 2024. For more information, visit brittneycorrigan.com.
'What is it about foxes' and 'Dispersal' were first published in Poetry is Currency.

Nancy Flynn

Nancy Flynn grew up on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, spent many years on a downtown creek in Ithaca, New York, and has lived near the mighty Columbia in Portland, Oregon since 2007. She attended Oberlin College, Cornell University, and has an M.A. in English from SUNY/Binghamton. A former university administrator, her writing has received an Oregon Literary Fellowship and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. 'Gift Event for Our New Gilded Age' was first published in Raven Chronicles and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her full-length poetry collection, Every Door Recklessly Ajar, was published in 2015. Her website is www.nancyflynn.com.

Daniel A Hannon

Is a live-long resident of Oregon—specifically, Portland. He has also lived and traveled in Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, France, Spain, Portugal and England. These experiences formed his views of the world and its inhabitants, and also its problems. He has been writing poetry for many years. He had a poem poem published in Gumball Poetry's Summer 2024 issue as well.

Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo

Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo is a poet, educator, and the author of Incarnation Again, a collection of poems that depict coming of age in a clergy family with a playful reverence for intellectual inquiry as a part of faithful practice. See more at her website at www.elizabethharlanferlo.com.
Elizabeth says: "When I was new to Portland years ago, I got a poem out of a gumball machine (I think at Hawthorne Powells) called "The Cowardly Lion's Apostrophe to Herself" and I kept it pinned up on my bulletin board for years. The Stacks is my writing place so I'm glad to see you here!"

Judy Jiang

Judy Jiang was born and raised in Oregon in a home with her parents, grandfather, and three siblings. Her writing and photography can be found in Oregon Humanities, Buckman Journal, and elsewhere. Judy is a 2024 Periplus Fellow and an Anaphora Arts Residency Fellow. Judy is currently at work on a memoir on daughterhood and loss. She is most free when making art, hiking wild landscapes, meditating, practicing yoga, and singing & dancing. Her website is judyonpaper.com.

Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. See Emma Lazarus on Wikipedia. The poem "The New Collosus" (1883) is cast into bronze and at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Carlos Reyes

The Empty Chairs of February (2024) is noted poet and translator Carlos Reyes' sixtenth published volume. Other recent poetry includes From the Four Hinges of the World (2023), Osage Elegy (2021), The Ebbing Tide (2021), Lament for Us All (2021), Sea Smoke to Ashes (2020), Along the Flaggy Shore (2018), Wrestling the Mistral (2026); translations: Poemas de amor y locura/Poems of Love and Madness; Selected translations (2013), and a Memoir: The Keys to the Cottage, Stories from the West of Ireland (2015). A three times finalist for the National Poetry Series, he is often nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Forthcoming publications: CHOICES FROM TWO POCKETS (early 2025), 2nd edition of KEYS TO THE COTTAGE (Lost Horse Press, later this year), INTO THE EYE OF THE JOURNEY, selected/ collected poems (Lynx House,Spring, 2025). This poem was first published in CHOICES FROM TWO POCKETS. His website is carlos-reyes-poet.com.

Denisse Sandoval Ramírez

Denisse has a degree in Communication Sciences from UNAM. She is a writer, proofreader and workshop facilitator. She works as an independent communicator in different academic, journalistic and cultural projects. She has traveled to Argentina, Colombia, Spain and Ecuador with her work. She is the founder of the Letras Violetas project, a platform for disseminating information about the life and work of women writers around the world. Find her on Instagram @denisse.sanram/ and TikTok @letrasvioletas.

Levin Schersvanaskitty

Levin Schersvanaskitty is a bicycle star and philosopher. You should probably see him do bike tricks.

Carolyn Supinka

Carolyn Supinka (she/her) is a visual artist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA from Oregon State University and BA from Carnegie Mellon University. Her poetry comics have appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Ecotone, HAD and Redivider. Her poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM, The Boiler, Sixth Finch, and Passages North. She creates zines with and is a co-editor of Conjunction Press. Her first full-length book of poetry and poetry comics, “Metamorphic Door”, is out now from Buckman Publishing. Both "Goose Attack" and "In her hoot" are in the collection.

Experiments

Message in a bottle

Several capsules prompt you to send a personalized message to another Gumball Poetry patron. After that patron creates a message, we will then print and insert a special code into a capsule so that a recipient may engage with the sender. Similar to a true 'message in a bottle', as if floating from one side of the ocean to the other.

Secret messages

Within the capsules, several secret messages await their opening.

Artwork

(click name for bio)

Sylvie Parzybok

Sylvie resides in the waterlogged city of Portland, with her two marvelous cats, Ferdinand and Myrtle. She is the Co-founder of Art Church, member of several bands, and is usually wearing very interesting socks. See more of Sylvie's work here.

Carolyn Supinka

See Carolyn's poet bio at left, or visit @queenofcalcium

Featured poem:

The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(1883)
inscribed in bronze on the Statue of Liberty