Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). He serves as the Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University, where he also works as an editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Denver Quarterly, Diagram, FIELD, Mid-American Review, RHINO, The Spectacle, andTYPO, among other places. He hails from New Jersey, holds an MFA from the University of Montana and an MA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and lives near Kansas City with his wife and children. 

The first gift Charlotte Rose Samuels remembers receiving was a teal plasticky notebook from the school nurse. Strange as it were, the arrival of the notebook did signify a watershed moment.

Growing up in the shadow of significant mental health challenges, Charlotte began to find solace in the spaces still yet to be explored, dreamed up, and understood. It was only through this impossibility, this potential energy — that Charlotte felt her mind quiet. To Charlotte, emptiness itself could be a vessel where one could seek one’s own authenticity and truth. Here, Charlotte discovered that taking on the unknown, less-traveled road could also be an antidote to feelings: overwhelm, doubt, fear, and guilt.

Embodying a multitude of identities as a public health researcher, a writer, a watercolorist, and soon-to-be nurse, Charlotte has come to find loving acceptance of her inability to fit into a singular mold.