Lead Editors
Ash Good (they/them) is a queer & non-binary poet, editor, designer & activist in Portland, Ore. They are curator of Bloom open mic, a reader for Frontier Poetry & an independent designer/publishing consultant for a number of journals, small presses and university programs. Ash's fifth collection of poetry, Us Clumsy Gods, was released with What Books Press in 2022. Poems recently appear in Voicemail Poems, Willawaw Journal, Cathexis, Not Very Quiet, The Timberline Review, The Cape Rock, Rise Up Review & others.
Emily Moon (she/her) is a transgender poet from Portland, Ore. She is author of It’s Just You and Me, Miss Moon. Her work includes appearances in or forthcoming from Pile Press, Boats Against the Current, The Viridian Door, Banyan Review, The Dawn Review, Culinary Origami, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @emilymoonpoet and Facebook.
Lauren Paredes (she/her) is a storyteller across mediums with a soft spot for the unusual. She's very smitten with erasure poetry, metaphysics, and the ekphrastic process in particular. As a co-founding editor of First Matter Press, she especially delights in helping first-time authors lean into the validity of their voice and vision. Her work can be found in Salamander, TRNSFR, Warm Milk, phoebe, and elsewhere.
Hailey Spencer (she/her) is a Seattle-based poet and dreamer. She is the author of the poetry collections Out of Love in Spring and Stories for When the Wolves Arrive. She is enamoured with form and shape in poetry, and the way language can be transformed to express what is typically inexpressible. Outside of poetry, she can often be found ripping up magazines for collages and staring at trees.
Alumni Editors
Andra Vltavín (formerly K. M. Lighthouse) is the author of Body Until Light, Time Counts Backward from Infinity, and two chapbooks of poetry. They have been published in many journals, including Toasted Cheese, and were a winner of the 2021 DiBiase poetry contest. Having copyedited the High Priestesses of Poetry anthologies, The Daily Utah Chronicle, more web articles than they can count, they have been happy to lend their skills to the burgeoning authors at First Matter Press. They live the revolutions of queerness, creative reuse, and polyamory with their wife, two bunnies, and a spinning wheel in Portland, OR. (ed. 2018-2021)
Caroline Wilcox Reul (she/her) is a translator, lexicographer and occasionally she writes a poem. Her poetry translations can be found in the PEN Poetry Series, Lunch Ticket, The Los Angeles Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Your Impossible Voice, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. (ed. 2021-2022)
Natalie Garyet lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes and edits. She was the Managing Editor of Tavern Books, a non-profit poetry press dedicated to publishing poetry in translation and reviving out-of-print collections, from 2012 until the press's closure in 2019. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Lewis & Clark Literary Review, The Grove Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Mantis, and Phantom, and have been featured on Oregon Poetic Voices and in the Fall/Winter 2014 Poetry Press Week. Her chapbook, Slow Witness, was published by Berberis Press in 2013. (ed. 2022)
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