Press and News - Sixteen Rivers Press

Welcoming our newest members: Janet Jennings and Greg Mahrer

Sep 5, 2025

We are very pleased to introduce our two newest members, Janet Jennings and Gregory Mahrer.

picture of Janet Jennings Janet Jennings writes: “I grew up in a Midwestern chocolate-making family. In my teens, I worked summers at the factory, amid the smell of roasting cocoa beans, where I packed twenty-five-pound boxes of chocolate drops and learned to drive a forklift. This experience proved surprisingly useful when I started Sunspire Natural Foods, a natural-confectionery company, which I ran for twenty years until poetry and family called.”

Janet’s poems and flash fiction have appeared in 32 Poems, Baltimore Review, Nimrod, the Sixteen Rivers anthology America, We Call Your Name, and elsewhere. She is the author of Traces in Water, a book of poetry, and lives “in a recently emptied nest” with her husband and dog in San Anselmo, California. One twin daughter, Charlie, now lives in New York, and the other, Marina, has recently traveled to Botswana with the Peace Corps.

Janet says, “I am thrilled to be part of the Sixteen Rivers community and look forward to learning about publishing, contributing where I can, supporting the collective as a whole, and getting to know its members.”

Greg Mahrer Gregory Mahrer’s first collection, A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent, was selected by John Yau as the winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and was published by Fordham University Press in 2016. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize. Mahrer’s work has appeared widely in journals such as Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, The Indiana Review, The New England Review, and Verse Daily. His poem “Refrain” received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention.

Mahrer is interested in the “harrowing beauty of adjacent worlds and in particular the shadow that our own world casts upon them.” His newest collection contemplates the existential question of “how long, how bright?” Mahrer divides his time between Northern California and Baja California Sur where, in collaboration with others, he builds homes that embody a modern Mexican aesthetic.

Each year, Sixteen Rivers selects new members on the basis of book-length manuscripts of poems submitted during our reading period from November 1 to February 1. Typically, one or two manuscripts are chosen, and their authors join the press as active members for a minimum of three years.

Jennings’s and Mahrer’s books will be published by Sixteen Rivers in April 2027.

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