Sixteen Rivers Press is happy to introduce our new members, whose books will appear in 2023: Matthew Monte and Joseph Zaccardi.
Matthew M. Monte grew up near San Francisco, California and went to the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he studied botany. His fiction, poetry, book reviews, music reviews, journalism, and essays have appeared in Sidestream, Creosote Journal, Transfer, Ashcan Magazine, The Snackbar Collective, iNaturalist, and the Poets 11 Anthologies (2014 and 2016). He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son. His debut collection, The Case of the Six-Sided Dream, won the 2017 Blue Light Poetry Prize.
Joseph Zaccardi is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, The Weight of Bodily Touches from Kelsay Books. His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Rattle, Salamander, and elsewhere. Zaccardi served as the poet laureate of Marin County, California, from 2013 to 2015. He is a member of the LGBTQ community. He says he does not consider himself a poet, in the ordinary sense of the word; he is a poet telling the story of life, a process that appears inexhaustible. He says to write a single poem is a selfless act and a minor miracle. But miracles, minor or otherwise, don’t happen by happenstance; they are engendered in part by hard work, in part by the generous help of others, and in part by inspiration and the drive to create. In times of trouble people often turn to poems, and poems often turn into prayers.