Meet the Authors NOVEMBER Edition - Saturday, November 1st, 2025

About the Authors and their books:

Benjamin Green is the author of eleven books, including The Sound of Fish Dreaming (Bellowing Ark Press, 1996) and the upcoming Old Man Looking through a Window at Night (Main Street Rag) and His Only Merit (Finishing Line Press). At the age of sixty-nine, he hopes his new work articulates a mature vision of the world and does so with some integrity. He resides in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.

About His Only Merit: "When I finished compiling poems for my collection entitled Old Man Looking through a Window at Night, I thought I was done writing poetry. After all, it had taken twenty-six years to collect enough work for another full-length collection. I was sixty-six years old; there did not seem time enough to gather poems for another book. Then, I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954 Knopf edition). Immediately I started writing responses to the work. Some of the reactions became “after” poems; some of the writing sounded like a reply. I conversed with Stevens’ poetry, and I conversed with Stevens, the man. Sometimes we argued; sometimes we agreed. Within a month, I had nineteen poems—this chapbook.

The nineteen poems allowed me to acknowledge Stevens’ influence as a modern poet using my

landscape--a high desert canyon in New Mexico--as the setting. The language is mine; the vocabulary is mine (even if Stevens’ work prodded me toward intellectual abstraction). Reading Stevens produced nineteen poems, definitely un-modern, the true work of a spiritual introvert living under a ribbon of sky between steep walls of rock."

Scott Archer Jones is currently trapped in his eighth novel. He lives in northern New Mexico, after stints in the Netherlands, Scotland, and Norway, plus less exotic locations. He has four award-winning books out, published by Southern Yellow Pine and Fomite, and a fifth that launched at the end of January 2025. What’s more important? Scott cuts all his own firewood, lives a mile from his nearest neighbor and writes grant applications for the community.

The Moth has bitten off more of East L.A. than he can chew, and is gnawed up himself by the neighborhood. On the fringes of serious crime, the Moth reveals himself as a man whose morals are largely good but whose ethics are shaky. He's battered by local forces – from the all-women Arpías gang to a manipulative detective who's forced him to fink out fellow crooks. It's a dark world where all good intentions go astray. The Moth's pawn-shop criminal schemes and his ambition to be the local Moriarty all tumble into disarray. Each walk-in through his door is a chance at riches or death, each job a success or a lesson in abject humiliation. Stumble along with the Moth as he serves a tough, ironic world, never quite getting there.