WAYE Editorial Team

WAYE Small Press is run by John T. Trigonis and Marinell Montales, owners of Sure Things, where WAYE: A Poetry Reading Series is hosted every month. For Issue 03, they are joined by Isabel Cruz and William Van Sickell as Guest Readers to help with the selection process.


  • Isabel Cruz is a Puerto Rican poet and Emeritus Youth Poetry Ambassador for the Paterson Poetry Festival. Among other awards, she won the 2024 Five College Prose & Poetry Prize and the 2024 Elizabeth Babcock Prize for Best Poem. Her work is published or forthcoming with The Poetry Society of New York, Ghost City Review, and By the WAYE, among others. In October 2024, she was a featured poet at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Cruz was recently named a 2025 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and awarded a full scholarship from The Poetry Project for their Late Summer 2025 Learning. As of January 2026, Cruz now serves as Vice President of Word Seed Inc.

  • William J. Van Sickell (he/him) is a poet and educator from New Jersey. He is the recipient of the 2022 Walter Glospie Poetry Prize awarded by the Academy of American Poets and New Jersey City University. His work has appeared in publications by WAYE Small Press, Red Wheelbarrow, Poets.org, and Pratt Institute.


  • Marinell is a freelance creative director and prop stylist living in Jersey City. Her work has appeared in House Beautiful, Chronogram Magazine, and Brownstoner among others. She has produced work for notable brands like Pholk Beauty and Eighty Magazine, a large-format print magazine she founded and ran as designer and creative director, publishing seven issues between 2014 and 2019. She owns vintage shop/used bookstore Sure Things with her partner, John, and when she's not at the shop or working on collaborations with other brands and local businesses, she's spending quality time with her two orange tabby cats, Cheddar and Colby-Jack.

  • J.T. Trigonis is a performance poet and published author of eight chapbooks. With the obligatory MFA in poetry writing from Brooklyn College, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a single written-on rejection slip from The New Yorker beckoning him to send more, his work has appeared in over 60 magazines and journals that have made appearances on the bottom shelf of the Barnes & Noble newsstand. Some of his favorites include Harpur Palate, California Quarterly, Rockland Review, Poetry Salzburg, Iodine Poetry Journal, Soup Can Magazine, The Red Wheelbarrow, and of course, By the WAYE. 


    Trigonis has been a part of the poetry/open mic scene since the 1990s and has headlined at over 30 venues across the NJ/NYC area. Most recently, he’s featured at the Red Wheelbarrow and River Read series. He plays master of ceremonies at WAYE (“We Appreciate Your Enthusiasm”), the monthly series he and his partner Marinell host at Sure Things, their vintage shop/used bookstore in JC Heights, and he serves as editorial director of By the WAYE. In 2025, Trigonis was selected as guest editor for Red Wheelbarrow 18, which shone a light on Hudson County’s vibrant poetry scene in a segment titled “New Shit!” His latest chapbook of selected poems, Through the Wreckage, will be published this February by Finishing Line Press.

Previous Guest Readers:


  • Theta Pavis is a poet, editor and educator. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of New Jersey Poets, The Red Wheelbarrow, Mom Egg Review, Spillwords Press, Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers (HeyDay Books) and many others. Her chapbook The Red Strobe was recently published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have also been performed onstage by Poetry Well in New York. She's received residencies from Arts By The People in New Jersey and the Bethany Arts Center in New York. She works in college communications and has taught journalism at several universities, including UCLA and Rutgers. She's reported for a range of newspapers, magazines and websites, including Wired, Discover and the Online Journalism Review.

  • I. Buenaventura (a.k.a Patrick) is a poet based in New Jersey. They hold an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. In addition, Patrick has practiced and taught both self-defense and martial arts for more than three decades. They self-published a book on self-defense for women called Your Body is Your Weapon: The Little Self-Defense Handbook, which they illustrated and wrote in free verse poetry. In October 2023, the book was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Inspirational / Self-Help Category of the 31st Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. 

    Their poetry has also been published in Slant'd Magazine and By the WAYE Issue 01, and Patrick has been a featured reader at various events in New Jersey and New York. 

    An activist for LGBTQ+ rights, Patrick fought for marriage equality in New Jersey in 2013. In 2022, Patrick began transitioning full-time and identifies as transmasculine and non-binary. 

    Patrick participated in an NPR interview on adults who transition past midlife and have been documenting their transition in a series of poems. Much of Patrick’s creative work serves as a form of activism in support of the trans community.


  • Benedicto Figueroa is a self taught poet, visual artist, and performance artist. Figueroa is the former Poet Laureate of Union City, NJ. They have toured with the performance poetry group The Mayhem Poets and have written and starred in the stage play SickLove for No Peeking Theatre. Figueroa has been published in Instigatorzine, Lamplighter Magazine, Jersey City Independent, the anthology Solo Para Locos, was a spotlight poet for PityMlik Press in 2023, and was featured in Pinky Thinker Press where they were the Editor’s Choice recipient. Figueroa is a member of the band Just Now Orchestra who’s debut album DOUG was released February 2020. Benedicto was also one of the 2020 Smush Gallery Summer Residency residents and recipient of the 2022 ArtHouse Cares Grant. In 2023 Figueroa received a Jersey City Arts and Culture Trust Fund Program Grant which they used to fund the TEXT-FOR-POEM Project of which they are the creator and Artistic Director. Their illustrated zine “When a Great Darkness Meets an Extraordinary Light” was published in 2021 and their immersive poetry installation “Are You There?” opened in November of 2022 at SMUSH Gallery where Figueroa was named Co-Artistic Director in 2021. Most recently they produced the performance art piece “On The Tongue” as part of the International performance art festival Jornada De Puertas Abierta and co-produced the performance art piece Cathedral of Stone and Water with Larissa Belčić for City of Water Day 2024.


  • Raul Garcia is a Dominican-American poet and filmmaker native to Jersey City, NJ whose written works include his recent micro fiction collection Atlands, by Bottlecap Press, as well as other fictions published in Bright Flash Literary Review, Complete Sentence, and Friday Flash Fiction.

ABOUT WAYE SMALL PRESS