John P. (Jack) Kristofco

Over the last thirty years, John P. (Jack) Kristofco has published over seven hundred poems and seventy short stories in about two hundred different publications,  including: Folio, Rattle, Bryant Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Fourth River, Stand, The MacGuffin, Sierra Nevada Review, BlueLine,  Slant, Pinyon, POEM, Snowy Egret, Freshwater Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. He has published four poetry collections, most recently Shadows on the Fog, with a fifth,  Selected Poems : 1990-2020,  currently being developed. He has also published a collection of short stories, The Alex Chronicles (2021) with a second, Incidents and Accidents  coming out in the summer of 2023.  Jack was the recipient of the 2002 Chaffin Prize for Fiction and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. 

In 2011, Jack retired from a distinguished, forty-year career as a professor and university administrator  (the last fourteen of those years as Dean of Wayne College at the University of Akron). In 2016, he established The Orchard Street Press to “provide an alternative publishing opportunity for new and established writers whose work deserves a broader audience.” In its six-plus years, Orchard Street has published over seventy titles (mostly poetry collections) by sixty writers from more than thirty states. In addition, Orchard Street conducts an annual Poetry Contest which offers cash prizes and provides the poems for Quiet Diamonds, Orchard Street’s highly regarded annual  journal.  The 2023 edition of QD will be the sixth. It is also from this annual Contest that Orchard Street identifies  poets to whom invitations are made to submit chapbooks to be considered for publication by the Press. The 2023 Contest will be accepting submissions up to April 30, 2023.  Information about the Poetry Contest is available at the Orchard Street Press website: orchpress.com.