About

Our Mission

Trestle Ties' mission is to create a bridge to publication and access to readers for emerging writers. We seek to create a safe and respectful place for emerging voices and to foster new writers. We also want to cultivate diversity, in both voice and form.

We aim to make the process of submission and publication open to all at no cost to the writer. We respect that submitting one's work is an anxious and personal process and do our best to be transparent about our decisions and process.

We chose the name Trestle Ties to represent the role we hope to play in writers' lives and the lives of the community. Trestles are bridges that convey large amounts of people, goods and ideas. Ties help keep the track stable and moving for miles and miles. Building on this metaphor, we hope each writer whose work is showcased will be a tie in our ongoing adventure to keep poetry at the forefront of literary culture.

Literature is not just a tool to depict feelings, but also a way to access history, people and a vehicle to be political. Trestle Ties will help make tracks to lend strength and stability to the process of producing work. We hope to help create community by showcasing emerging works.

Thank you for reading and submitting to Trestle Ties.

Onyedikachi Chinedu is a Nigerian poet whose poems are published/forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Cortland Review, Guesthouse Lit, FU Review, Anomaly, Trestle Ties, Banyan Review, etc. They study the English language at the University of Port Harcourt, Choba, Nigeria.

Suchi is a nyc and west coast based painter, poet and yogi. Having just submitted my MFA thesis. I am eager and honored to enter through word and image the worlds of others. You could find my chapbooks, poems, readings, reviews, paintings and editorial in various print and digital locales such as: The Warren, Prompt Press, The Brooklyn Review, Whitehot Art Magazine, Ghost City Press, Cleveland Review of Books, The Columbia Journal, The New School Urban Systems Lab, The Brooklyn Rail.

Juleen Eun Sun Johnson is an interdisciplinary BIPOC writer and artist. Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea and adopted when she was three, she was taken to Valdez, Alaska where she spent her formative years. Johnson is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. She was awarded the Cannon Beach Art Association Grant for writing and art. Johnson earned an MFA in Visual Studies from PNCA and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Johnson’s work has been published in: The Rio Grande Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, Poetry Northwest and other journals and anthologies. Her poem won the Zone 3 Press Prize for Poetry. Johnson’s poems have been nominated for the Best of Net. She is the founding editor of Trestle Ties: A Landscape of Emergence.
More at her website.

Carrie Mariko Williams is an accomplished oil painter who studied at a classical atelier in Seattle. Before pursuing her art career, she was an anthropologist in South Asia. After meeting her husband, while living in the funk, grit and grime of the Oregon Coast her brushstrokes became loose, thick, and abstract. She and her husband recently relocated to Las Vegas, New Mexico to revive an old meat market and bakery to create a space for the arts.

Aaron Schuman is Trestle Ties' web worker.
Find more at his website.

Margaret K. Foley is a writer, editor, poet, educator, transcriber, violinist, and composer. She holds a MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2019 and a BA in English from Augustana College in Rock Island, IL in 2011. She was a host of the jubilat/Jones Poetry Reading Series from 2016 - 2018. She specializes in creative writing, classical music, folk music, and her topical specialties include grief, feminism, trauma, disability and chronic illness, and environmentalism.
She has five years of collegiate teaching experience and three years of ESL teaching experience. She has fifteen years of experience teaching violin lessons and twenty-six years of experience playing and performing violin. She has four years of office and administration work experience.
In the past, she has been an English teacher for Czech three-year-olds, a musical instrument store employee, and a digital marketing publisher and copywriter. She is from Illinois and lives in Connecticut, by way of Western Massachusetts and Prague, Czech Republic.
More at her website.

David Greenspan is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as a Promotion Editor for Slope Editions. His poems have appeared, or will soon, in places like DIAGRAM, Laurel Review, New South, The Southeast Review, The Sonora Review, and others.

Jake Vermaas (he/him/siya) is a Filipino American poet and engineer studying as a guest on the Kanaka Maoli Island of Oahu. Formerly of the Portland area, where he founded the Whitenoise Project, a BIPOC-centered reading series now entering its fifth year, as well as "on becoming          ", a generative workshop space around the state and process of becoming.

Laura S. Marshall (she/they) is a poet, educator, and former linguist who lives between Albany, NY, and Amherst, MA. Their work appears or is forthcoming in South Dakota Review, Bennington Review, juked, Lunch Ticket, 8 Poems, Trestle Ties, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at UMass Amherst and previously served as a special features editor for jubilat.