copyright 2009

The History of Sage Trail Poetry Magazine

In October 1999, Cathryn McCracken founded the poetry magazine, Willow Street, which was published monthly in Albuquerque, New Mexico until November 2002. In December 2002, Dale Harris founded another monthly poetry magazine, Central Avenue, which continued until November 2007. In the tradition of these two magazines with assistance from Harris, Sage Trail Poetry Magazine was born.

send us your wisdom
your penetrating intelligence
the results of your climb

With this call for poems, Sage Trail Poetry Magazine was launched in February 2008 by poets Suzanne Frost and Cathryn McCracken as a monthly poetry magazine dedicated to bringing fine contemporary poetry that mattered to the public. The magazine was published both in Santa Barbara, California and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Sage Trail strove to be unique by publishing finely printed hard copy issues as well as publishing free online. Our intention was to be a poet’s magazine above all and to support the many threads of flourishing contemporary styles. In total during the last two years, Sage Trail Press published 16 issues—a total of 384 poems and 186 poets from across the country, England, Canada, and Japan. We distributed hard copy editions both in
New Mexico and California to such places as Beyond Baroque in Venice, City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and Bookworks in Albuquerque.

Each new issue of Sage Trail was released at the "Poetry Zone" poetry reading series that will continue on the second Saturday of each month at 2:00 PM upstairs in the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Santa Barbara, California. The address is 21 West Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101. We notified poets when their work was included in an upcoming issue and welcomed them to come read and participate. At this reading, all published poets each month received their two complimentary hard copies of the magazine. If they did not attend, their copies were mailed to them.

In Fall 2008, faced with the illness (and subsequent death) of McCracken in Albuquerque, Frost successfully recruited poet Sojourner Kincaid Rolle from
Santa Barbara to help choose poems and to assist with other editorial duties. After a full year of monthly editions, the magazine switched to a bimonthly format (every other month) and in April 2009, G. Murray Thomas from Long Beach became another valuable addition to the Sage Trail editorial staff.

Subsidized by Frost with no advertising, subscription sales were brisk and distribution increased every quarter in the two years Sage Trail was published. But by October 2009, due to the lack of sufficient financial and human resources, the magazine is forced to stop publication. This hiatus may last indefinitely. We are returning publishing rights to all poetry we have received to their authors as of our last October & November 2009 issue.

We close this poetry series tired but proud to have been part of a poetry tree that represented a decade of contemporary poetry.

Bios of the Editorial Staff:

Editor and Publisher: Suzanne Frost received her BA in English and Philosophy and her MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. She currently directs the monthly poetry reading at the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Santa Barbara. She has published three chapbooks, and her poetry has been in several poetry journals and publications. In New Mexico, she was on the Board of Directors of several literary organizations, such as the Taos Poetry Circus, the Turquoise Trail Arts Council (TTAC), and the Tapestry Players Theater Company in New Mexico. She was also a writing teacher for the “Homebound Writer’s Project,” poetry in the schools for the Society of the Muse of the Southwest (SOMOS) in Taos, and in Albuquerque was an Arts Editor for the weekly newspaper, the East Mountain Telegraph, for several years.

Advisory Editor: Sojourner Kincaid Rolle holds a BA ( UNC-Charlotte, 1978 and a JD (UC Berkeley, 1981). Her first full-length collection of poems, Black Street, (University of California, Santa Barbara: Center for Black Studies Research, 2009). In 2007, she released Black Street, a spoken word CD. .She has published poems in journals, anthologies, and six chapbooks, which includes Common Ancestry (Millie Grazie Press, 1999). In addition to writing several plays and stage productions, Rolle edited several small anthologies of her workshop participants' work including Inner Space (California Arts in Corrections, 1988) and WOW (Women of Words) from the 1995 Yachats Literary Festival poetry workshop. Her poems have appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions including her 2006 solo show, "Between Us."

Rolle has given readings of her work, appeared on panels, lectured, and conducted workshops for many years at universities, libraries, retreats, symposia, and festivals. She has been Writer-in-Residence at the Santa Barbara Public Library and several schools in the Santa Barbara area. She was a founding member of the Santa Barbara Poetry Festival Committee and for the past fifteen years, has hosted ongoing poetry readings in Santa Barbara, including her yearly Langston Hughes event.

Advisory Editor: G. Murray Thomas’s current writings include poetry, political commentary, music criticism, and a novel. Previous publications include past editor & publisher of Next.... Magazine, his poetry book, Cows on the Freeway (iUniverse.com), and Paper Shredders, An Anthology of Surf Writing, which he edited (also iUniverse.com). His poem, “Fairy Rings” won an honorable mention in the 2008 Rachel Carson Sense of Wonder Contest.

Associate Editor: Chuck McCollum lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and family. Formerly a comedian and screenwriter, he currently divides his time between casting film & television projects, directing theater, and acting.

Suzanne Frost