Chris Warman
President
Chris Warman is a community organizer and nonprofit professional. He serves as the Baltimore Market Director for Reinvestment Fund, a national community development financial institution. Previously, he worked for the Baltimore Community Foundation as a member of their finance and discretionary grantmaking and impact investing teams. Chris earned an MS in Nonprofit Management & Social Entrepreneurship and an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts, both from the University of Baltimore. His poetry and prose have appeared in Welter and Hobo Pancakes, and his plays have been produced at UB and the John Hewitt International Summer School. Lately, he has been writing scenarios set in realms both fantastic and realist for a tabletop roleplaying game group.
Heather Rounds
Vice President
Heather Rounds is the author of several books, including the novel There (Emergency Press, 2011), the novella She Named Him Michael (Ink Press, 2017) and the novel Light There is to Find (Adelaide Books, 2018). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including PANK, Smokelong Quarterly, Bayou Magazine and Atticus Review. She serves as Acquisitions Editor for Mason Jar Press, a Baltimore-based indie publisher. Rounds has two decades of experience in the nonprofit world, with expertise in project management and development & fundraising. She is a contributing writer and editor for Iraq’s United Nations Industry Development Programs. Website: heatherrounds.com
Jaden Beall
Treasurer
Jaden Beall grew up with their grandmother, an avid oral storyteller and local historian, in northern Montgomery County, Maryland, and has lived in the Baltimore area since 2018. Jaden has served in leadership for various organizations, including in student leadership for the Queer Student Union at Towson University, where they earned a BS in Accounting. Jaden currently serves as Treasurer for the Greater Baltimore chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. They work at the University of Baltimore as a Financial Analyst, where they are also pursuing an MS in Accounting & Business Advisory Services.
Eva Quintos Tennant
Secretary
Eva Quintos Tennant began a career in communications more than 25 years ago, holding posts as an editor, production designer, and creative director. After she turned 50, she pursued and earned an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore where she received the Plork Award, recognizing “extraordinary creativity, originality and imagination in the integration of creative writing and book design.” Here she rekindled her lifelong love of reading and writing. The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Eva is a Maryland-based writer and photographer whose work has appeared in River River, Welter, Maryland in Poetry and elsewhere. She shares Passager’s mission to amplify the voices of emerging mature writers, and is developing a writers’ resource website for aspiring older writers. Eva joined the Board in 2022, and serves as chair of its Marketing Committee. She currently leads a marketing communications and graphic design team at the University of Maryland by day; and by night is at work on a narrative about first-generation identity.
Mary Azrael
Director
Shirley Brewer
Director
Shirley J. Brewer lives in Baltimore and serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts. Her poems garnish Barrow Street, Passager, Gargoyle, Poetry East, Tar River Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. Shirley’s books include A Little Breast Music (Passager Books), After Words (Apprentice House), Bistro in Another Realm (Main Street Rag), and Wild Girls (Apprentice House). Shirley was chosen to receive the first-ever Creativity Award from the University of Baltimore prior to earning her Master’s in Creative Writing/Publishing Arts. She was interviewed by Maryland’s former poet laureate, Grace Cavalieri, for her long-running series “The Poet and the Poem” at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. As a result, Shirley’s poems are part of the Lunar Codex program and are currently on the moon! Website: shirleyjbrewer.com
Steven Leyva
Director
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow, the winner of the 2012 Cobalt Review Poetry Prize, author of the chapbook Low Parish, and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His latest collection is The Opposite of Cruelty (Blair Publishing, 2025). Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design. He previously taught high school English in the Baltimore City public schools. As a fan of both comic book and otaku culture, Steven can often be found at various “cons” around the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. metro areas.
Kathy Mangan
Director
Kathy Mangan is the author of Above the Tree Line. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize, and other journals and anthologies. She has given readings at numerous colleges and universities as well as the Folger Library and the Library of Congress. For more than forty years, she taught literature and creative writing at McDaniel College, where she held the Joan Develin Coley Chair in Creative Expression & the Arts. She lives in Baltimore and also spends time at a cabin on Cacapon Mountain in West Virginia.