Rosemarie Dombrowski (RD) (founding editor) is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, the founding editor of rinky dink press, and the founding director of Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that facilitates self-care and healing through poetry.
RD is the recipient of a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and the winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition. She was named a finalist for both the Whitman Bicentennial Award (2019) and the Joy Harjo Poetry Contest (2023). Her work has appeared in Poetry Daily, poets.org, at the Emily Dickinson Museum, on NPR, the TEDx stage, and elsewhere.
She teaches at Arizona State University, where she’s the creator of Verses for Vets, a poetic medicine program for veterans. She’s also the faculty editor of Grey Matter, the medical poetry journal of the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix.
RD is the granddaughter, daughter, and half-sister (x2) of veterans and a caregiver to her adult son with disabilities.
Virgil Connor (co-founding & managing editor) is a writer, editor, artist, academic, and veteran of the U.S. Air Force. They earned an A.S. in Physical Therapy from the community college of the Air Force and a BFA in Creative Writing at Ari-zona State University (2024). They were the 2024 recipient of the Student Worker Leadership Award at ASU.
Virgil served as the assistant managing editor and co-fiction editor of the Rio Review (Fall 2020) and is the co-founding editor of ISSUED. Their work has appeared in Write On, Downtown (Spring 2022) and Canyon Voices (Fall 2023).
Virgil enjoys exploring all genres, but their heart is buried in the lush fields of sci-fi and fantasy romance. They’ve been all over the planet searching for peace in the quiet and the roar.
Paige Danes is a writer, editor, musician, and engineer with a particular interest in the intersectionality of science, art, and business. She is currently pursuing a B.S.E. in Aerospace En-gineering from Arizona State University with a focus on leadership and systems management. She is also co-founder and CEO of Devils Prosthetics, a tech start-up focused on innovating accessible, affordable, and personalized prosthet-ics for amputee children.
Savannah Rose Dagupion (design editor) is a journalist specializing in long-form writing and community engagement reporting with a focus in social work. She is a freelance reporter for Lonely Planet and a contributing author for its latest “blue spine” guidebook on Maui. Savannah is graduating with
honors from Arizona State University in May 2025, earning her bachelor’s
degrees in journalism and English. In her time as an undergraduate
student, she served as editor-in-chief of State Press Magazine, design
editor for ISSUED: stories of service and an editor for Write On, Downtown:
A Journal of Phoenix Creativity. She also worked as a digital marketing
specialist in the Cronkite Agency. In 2021, Savannah was named Hawaiʻi’s
Journalist of the Year by the Journalism Education Association.
When covering communities, she places importance on preserving culture
and being a good steward of the land, values she maintains from her
Native Hawaiian culture
Lexi Hladik is a writer, editor, dancer, and choreographer with a passion for storytelling in all forms. She has an A.A. in English Literature from Scottsdale Community College and a B.A. in English from Arizona State University, where she is now pursuing her M.A. in English. She is a freelance editor for first time novelists preparing themselves to self-publish and copyeditor creating and editing web content for businesses. When she isn’t writing essays and discussion board posts, Lexi is working on her first novel. You can find her first published piece in a zine called Bloody Funny: Prose and Poetry About Periods.
Sophia Gubka is a writer, editor, academic, and lover of the human psyche. She earned a B.S. in Psychology with minors in Sociology and Family and Human Development from ASU in May 2025. She is looking to pursue a career in poetry ther-apy, and when she’s not at the antique store or consuming copious amounts of caffeine, she’s reading and writing poet-ry. She wrote a collection of psychological- and medical-based poems for her thesis, entitled Cauterized. Her first pub-lished piece, “Dermatology,” can be found in Grey Matter: An Anthology of Contemporary Medical Poems, the first pub-lished anthology from the medical poetry journal at Universi-ty of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix.
Fabian Sandez is a writer, academic, and horror enthusiast. He has an associate degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and is pursuing a BA in English at ASU. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, doing deep dives on music, and collecting vintage manga. He is currently working on a short anthology series reimagining old folk tales into modern times.
ISSUED 