Meet the Collective

Stephen Furlong is a writer who is currently living outside Kansas City, Missouri with his wife and cat. He is the author of the chapbook What Loss Taught Me (Nostrovia! Press, 2018) and currently serves as an adjunct instructor in the English Department at Metropolitan Community College - Longview. He can be found on Twitter @StephenJFurlong.

Christopher Morgan is a Lebanese American poet and editor who grew up in Detroit, the Bible Belt of Georgia, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently lives with his wife and baby. The Founding Editor of the Garden Party Collective, his prose poems have been performed as short plays, illustrated as posters, and can be found most recently at Gargoyle and Bennington Review. He loves the woods, designing games, and happy hour margaritas.

Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and The Cartography of Sleep (Nostrovia! Press, 2018). Her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, National Book Critics Circle, and the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, AGNI, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. To read some of her work visit https://www.lauravillareal.com/.

Lyd Havens is the author of Chokecherry (Game Over Books, 2021). Her poetry has previously been published in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and New Delta Review, among others. Lyd lives in Boise, Idaho. They can be found online at lydhavens.com/ and @lydhavens.

Bob Sykora is the author of the chapbook I Was Talking About Love–You Are Talking About Geography (Nostrovia! Press, 2016). A graduate of the UMass Boston MFA program, he lives in Kansas City, teaches at community college, and co-hosts The Line Break podcast. He can be found online at bobsykora.com and @bob_sykora_.

Christina Ortiz is an artist originally from Austin, Texas, who graduated with a BM in Music Education from Texas State University and a MM in Vocal Performance from George Mason University. Christina currently resides in Northern Virginia with her fiancé and two cats, Chicken Strip and Texas Toast, where she teaches private voice and piano lessons, and enjoys making artwork in a variety of mediums in her spare time.

Origins

In 2015, Christopher Morgan started the Nostrovia! Press Chapbook Contest, offering a free print opportunity for three winners each year. Three years later, Bob Sykora (from the 2016 chapbook series) joined the team, and we published our 2018 chaps(!): Lyd Havens, Laura Villareal, and Stephen Furlong.

All three writers wanted to join in the fun, and the Garden Party Collective was born!