Meet the Team
Anne - Founder/Editor
Anne Kinsey (they/them) is a poet, author, and trauma recovery professional whose work centers intersectionality, social transformation, and healing from systemic harm. With a background in anti-trafficking leadership, activism, and direct client care, they bring intellectual rigor and deep relational attunement to the manuscripts they help shape.
Anne is the author of Mosaic Hearts: Poems on Being a Queer and Interracial Family in the South (2025) and Find Your F*cking Fire: Poems on Embracing Anger for Social Change (2025). Their work appears in the anthology, Love Is for All of Us, as well as other literary publications. For more than two decades, they have worked in writing and editorial roles across independent and established platforms.
As Founder and Executive Director of Love Powered Life, a nonprofit serving trans and queer survivors of human trafficking, Anne integrates neurofeedback, heart rate variability biofeedback, and writing-as-healing practices into their work. They have also provided consulting support to major anti-trafficking organizations and federal initiatives within the United States.
Outside of publishing, Anne can often be found hiking wooded trails, laughing in the kitchen with their spouse and three teenagers, or in late-night conversations about tarot and collective liberation. Their faithful service dog maintains a strict security protocol against squirrels, skunks, and suspicious nighttime leaf activity.
Balsam Spring Publishing prioritizes submissions from Racialized, Trans, Queer, Fat, Disabled, Immigrant, Indigenous, and financially marginalized writers.
What Anne is Looking For:
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Poetry collections rooted in complex lived experience
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Nonlinear, braided, or interactive memoir
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Witchy, metaphysical, and spiritually expansive work
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Writing that engages nature as teacher, mirror, or medicine
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Politically conscious, anti-fascist, abolitionist, or revolutionary texts
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Work that challenges colonial frameworks in mental health, medicine, education, and family systems
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Narratives exploring self-directed education and nontraditional learning
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Intimate, slice-of-life nonfiction and poetry
Trent - Founder/Editor
Trent Clifford (he/him) has dedicated his career to telling bold stories, both on the page and on the stage. He is a poet, playwright, and published author who has the unique privilege of working with playwrights, musical writers, and aspiring authors to develop their work toward either production or publication.
In Trent’s literary pursuits, his own work includes Reclaiming Faith (2024) and By a Firefly’s Glow (2025), and his plays have been performed across the country. He has years of experience as a developmental editor for Indie authors, and particularly prizes the ability of authors on the margins to tell stories that bend and blend genres and defy convention.
Theatrically speaking, he serves as the Founder and Artistic Director of the Epiphanies New Works Festivals, where he specializes in developing new plays and musicals in collaboration with writers from around the world, he is the Playwright in Residence for Waco Civic Tours, a professional repertory theatre company that brings shows to public schools in Central Texas, and he is a dramaturg and member of the creative team for MusicalWriters.com, an organization dedicated to helping writers of contemporary musicals take their projects from page to stage. An award-winning playwright himself, his plays have been produced across the country, with current projects in development.
When he isn’t fully immersed in telling a new story, you'll probably find him spending time with his incredibly supportive husband, Chris. They and their two dogs like to spend their evenings laughing, taking walks, playing board games, hosting dinners, or reading novels together.
Balsam Spring Publishing prioritizes submissions from Racialized, Trans, Queer, Fat, Disabled, Immigrant, Indigenous, and financially marginalized writers.
What Trent is Looking For:
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Poetry collections that either eviscerate or uplift, making meaning of the mundane
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Memoirs that offer hope and healing
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Genre-bending books that felt impossible to write but even more impossible not to write
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Queer spirituality and liberation
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New stories about old things
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Narratives that invite readers into newfound curiosities
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Reimagining spirituality in a modern world
