We believe in the power of mining creativity from life experience.
Our Team
Founder & Publisher / John Fadely
John Fadely’s debut book of poetry, Before Leaving the Island, won the 2025 Trail to Table Book Award in Poetry (Trail to Table is an imprint of Wandering Aengus Press) and will be published in April 2026. Currently John is co-translating an illustrated edition of Tang and Song dynasty poetry. He co-founded a reading group that explores modern and contemporary long poems through close readings, and is an active participant in the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) community hosted by the Kelly Writers House at University of Pennsylvania. John lived in Asia for 30 years, including practicing law in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore for 25 years, and resides in Portola Valley, California.
Editor-in-Chief / Autumn McClintock
Autumn McClintock is a professional writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her latest chapbook is Dirt Bird (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2023). Her previous editing experience includes working as Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review and as a long-time staff reader for Ploughshares. You can find her poems in The Account, Cimarron Review, RHINO, Whale Road Review, and others.
Design / Olivetree Design
Olivetree Design (olivetreedesign.com) is a graphic design business, founded by Mary Anne Casey, that specializes in creative direction & visual communication with a focus on printed material (books, magazines) as well as museum exhibitions. Casey’s professional career highlights many of her lifelong passions: books, nature and the outdoors, & museums. She has worked on staff or as a freelancer for Penguin, S&S, HarperCollins, Winterthur Museum, Longwood Gardens, the Penn Museum, and The Rosenbach Museum & Library.
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Publicity / Holly Watson PR
Supporting publicity for Fifth Stanza Press and its publications, Holly Watson PR (hollywatsonpr.com) specializes in national and local publicity campaigns primarily for adult fiction and non-fiction (including poetry and literary fiction) books, as well as for select children’s books. With two decades of experience working with major publishing houses including National Geographic Books, Viking Penguin Books, Liveright / W.W. Norton & Co., Harper, Oxford University Press, Red Hen Press, and Princeton University Press, HWPR is also the primary publicity contact for Akashic Books.
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Advisory Board
SARA JUNE ARNOLD
Sara June Arnold founded June Road Press in 2020 and serves as its publisher, editor, and designer. Sara has 20 years of wide-ranging editorial, design, and production experience. She began her career in educational publishing in the Boston area and went on to manage and edit university publications in Southern California. For the past decade, she has operated as a freelance copy and line editor.
SALLY BALL
Sally Ball is a poet, Associate Director at Four Way Books (an independent press based in New York City) and Professor of English at Arizona State University. Sally is the author of three books: Hold Sway, Wreck Me, and Annus Mirabilis, the latter of which was selected by Ellen Bryant Voigt for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared widely, and she is a recipient of fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camac Centre d'Art, the James Merrill House, and the Ucross Foundation.
AL FILREIS
Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, founding faculty director of the Kelly
Writers House, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, co-director of Penn-Sound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine, all at the University of Pennsylvania. Al is also the founder and creator of ModPo, one of the first humanities massive open online courses, which he has been leading since 2012, and the host of the podcast PoemTalk. His books include: Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60; 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of Word War II and Remade the Modern; and The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, among others.
JILL McCABE JOHNSON
Jill is the founder and editor-in-chief at Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table. ​Jill's most recent book is Tangled in Vow & Beseech, finalist for the Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award and Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Award from MoonPath Press. Her memoir, Learning to Spar, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in January 2027. Honors include support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hedgebrook, and Artist Trust, as well as seven Pushcart nominations. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, the Mari Sandoz Prairie Schooner Short Story Award, the Paula Jones Gardiner Memorial Award from Floating Bridge Press, and the Editors Prize from ScissorTale Review. Her essay, "The Night Gary Drove Me Home" published in Slate, was named a Longreads Best of 2021 Number One Stories and has been translated into fourteen languages.