Poets James Crews and Brad Peacock with Jason O’Toole and Alix Klingenberg

James Crews and Brad Peacock edited a beautiful anthology of compassionate poems of connection and affirmation that are a celebration of all kinds of love—romantic, family, friendship, self-love, and love for nature.  The collection, called Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness and Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community and Friends, is gathered from a diverse group of contemporary writers, both part of and allied with the LGBTQIA+ community, with a special focus on queer, nonbinary, and transgender poets. 

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James Crews is the editor of numerous anthologies, including New England Book Award winner The Wonder of Small Things, The Path to Kindness, and How to Love the World, which has over 100,000 copies in print. He and his work have been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and in People magazine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning books of poetry, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The Sun, The New Republic, and other journals. Crews recently joined the New York Zen Center as a faculty member in the Contemplative Medicine Fellowship Program. He teaches mindfulness and writing throughout the United States, and lives with his husband in the woods of southern Vermont.

Brad Peacock is a veteran, writer, and long-time organic farmer from Shaftsbury, Vermont, whose passion is to bring people closer to one another and the natural world. His poems have been published in several anthologies, and his op-ed pieces have appeared in newspapers across the United States. He lives with his husband on forty rocky acres that they are restoring to a habitat for pollinators and native species.

Jason O’Toole originally from Albany, NY, was the 6th Poet Laureate of North Andover, MA.  He is the host and organizer of the Whittier Birthplace Summer Poetry Festival, Poet’s Corner at The Purple Couch Bookstore, and Diverging Poets of New England with Christa Lamb.  Additionally, he is co-founder of the Anne Bradstreet Poetry Contest, a workshop leader at Mass Poetry Festival, and a judge for the Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize and the Capital Region Slam Poetry Festival in NY.  He is Treasurer of Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco, and works in elder and disability advocacy in the greater Boston area. He was the vocalist of the 1980s Hardcore Punk band Life’s Blood (Prank Records) and a rumoured future member of SWRM of Providence.  He is the author of three full collections of poetry, three chapbooks and has poems in Gargoyle, Another Chicago Magazine, Wednesday Magazine, and anthologies edited by James Crews, Melanie Simms, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association.  He earned his BA from Eugene Lang College and an MBA from St. Joseph’s College of Maine.

Alix Klingenberg is a poet, spiritual director, and creative dilettante. She describes herself as a cross between an ethereal woodland creature and an alternative 90’s girl stereotype and is only half-kidding. Alix graduated from Oberlin College in 2003 with a degree in Visual Art where she studied film and photography but also took way too many classes in Spanish literature and personality psychology to not have it count for something. She is obsessed with people dynamics, myth, philosophy, and imagination.