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Humana Obscura

Humana Obscura is an independent nature-focused literary magazine. The magazine accepts poetry, short prose under 1,000 words, and artwork in various medium.
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As our name suggests—“obscured human”—we focus on work where the human element is concealed but not entirely absent, aiming to revive the nature genre. Humana Obscura’s mission is to publish and promote the best work of today’s voices and talents. Our intention is to inspire readers and enrich their lives while providing an inclusive space for elevating the voices, expressions, and creative work o

f our contributors. Founded in 2020, Humana Obscura is published online and in print twice yearly, and features work from around the world. Visit our website for submission guidelines.

08/30/2024

Excerpt of “The End of Summer—or—Meeting An Old Lover in Moravia” by Sally Anderson Boström in the Summer 2024 issue of . Read the full piece in the digital edition of the issue on our website, link in bio.
Sally Anderson Boström, PhD, is the author of the chapbook Harvest (2021) and numerous poems, essays, and short stories. Her creative work dances on themes of motherhood, desire, ancestral inheritance, and blindness. Originally from California, she has spent the last decade living in Sweden and Czechia. She is currently working on a novel based on her ancestors from the Jizera Mountains. You can find her on Instagram @‌when_sally_writes and see a list of her recently published work on her website www.sallyandersonbostrom.com

08/29/2024

Detail of “No Worries” and “Wondrous” by Summer 2024 issue Cover Artist Amber Lauder

08/29/2024

Sally Zaino’s “Water” in the Summer 2024 issue of
Sally Zaino’s poetry has appeared previously in Cider Press Review, Avocet, Flycatcher, Snowy Egret, Watershed, Poetry Takes Wings (editor’s choice) and others. Her chapbook, Hard Frost, was the winner of the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices competition in 2013. Essays have appeared in Flycatcher and The Ecological Citizen (Rewilding). She co-edits the online and print poetry journal Earthshine. She has focused for many years on land protection, land use, and natural history, and is now directing that energy towards poetry and writing.

08/28/2024

“Infinity” by Rose-Marie Keller-Flaig in the Summer 2024 issue of
Rose-Marie Keller-Flaig lives in the south of Germany. Nature is a natural part of her life. The optical limitation of macro photography enables her to direct the viewer’s eye to what is essential for her in the photographed object. Her aim is always to trigger feelings and associations in the viewer of these objects that she herself felt when taking the picture. To intensify this effect, she sometimes abstracts the forms and structures found in nature so that only color and light remain to create feelings. Check out her work on Instagram .

08/28/2024

“Fossil” by Vanessa Napolitano in the Summer 2024 issue of
Vanessa Napolitano obtained an MA in Poetry from MMU in 2006, but it took her a while to gain confidence in submitting work. In recent years, and particularly since writing with more intensity through the pandemic, she has been published in places such as Poetry Wales, Mom Egg Review, and Free Verse Revolution. She has had work in anthologies such as Bent Key’s Ey Up Again and the Leeds Poetry Festival anthology. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for a poem last year by Black Cat Poetry Press who will be publishing her debut pamphlet this summer. She also has a further pamphlet due out with Kelsay Books later this year.

08/28/2024

Detail of “Amager” by Sarah Hewitt in the Summer 2024 issue of .photojournal
Sarah Hewitt is a designer from Colorado. She loves the color blue, the great outdoors, and exploring. More of her photography is available at http://sphotojournal.com

08/27/2024

Excerpt of Mary Ann Larkin’s “A Lock of Patrick’s Mother’s Hair” in the Summer 2024 issue of . Read the full piece in the digital edition of the issue on our website, link in bio.
Mary Ann Larkin is the author of That Deep and Steady Hum (Broadkill River Press) and six poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, and other journals. She co-founded the Cleveland-based Big Mama Poetry Troupe in the 1970s, which performed from Chicago to New York City. Larkin has taught writing at a number of colleges, most recently at Howard University, and written for NPR, NIH, Foundation News, and others. She attended Yaddo and the Jentel Foundation. A co-founder of Pond Road Press, she published Jack Gilbert’s Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh.

08/26/2024

Patricia Hemminger’s “Midsummer” in the Summer 2024 issue of
Patricia Hemminger‘s poetry is informed and inspired by her science background, love of nature, and the experience of growing up in rural North Yorkshire, UK. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals including Spillway, Streetlight Magazine, and Peregrine Journal, and in her chapbook, What Do We Know of Time? She holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and is a graduate of NYU’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and of Drew University’s MFA Poetry and Poetry in Translation Program. She is currently producer of a documentary on green chemistry: Safer Stuff: Green Chemistry Gets Down to Business.

08/26/2024

Detail of Jaimie Ladysh’s “Through the Meadows to the Sea” and “Rainy Summer Day” in the Summer 2024 issue of
Jaimie Ladysh is a lens based interdisciplinary artist. Her work is rooted in place in a spiritual way within the natural world. She explores different themes but the ideas throughout are connection to the universal through nostalgic appeal to a place. There is a comforting solidarity and peaceful longing about the past and a photograph is already in the past. Currently exploring digital with edited and some composited images, she prints the images on archival papers, then further manipulates with hand-coloring, painting, and sometimes encaustics. The results are often described as ethereal.

08/24/2024

“Dancing with Deer” by Joyce Brinkman in the Summer 2024 issue of
Joyce Brinkman believes in poetry as public art. She creates public poetry projects involving her poetry and the poetry of others, often featuring wildlife. Brinkman thinks she would be frightened by dinosaurs, but otherwise she pretty much loves all the wild living things of Earth, both flora and fauna. She feeds both feathered and furry creatures while capturing them in poetry. She knows that a w**d is simply a plant that humans don’t know how to put to some use. Besides several public art pieces that she collaborated on with artists working in glass or another medium, Brinkman has collaborated on printed work with international poets. The latest of which is Catena Poetic: An International Collaboration by Finishing Line Press (2022). She has also co-edited books, including The Polaris Trilogy, a world anthology that will be sent to the Moon on a NASA flight to be part of the Lunar Codex for millions of years.

08/23/2024

“Deer Creek” by Anja Mujić in the Summer 2024 issue of
Anja Mujić is a Bosnian/Australian writer, dance artist, musician, yoga/meditation facilitator, and avid traveller currently based in Berlin. Her work has appeared in publications including TravelMag, Visual Verse Anthology, Dancehouse Diaries, and Be In The Know Berlin, as well as for exhibition, theatre, performance, and film. Her first collection of poetic prose love letters to places… (Leschenault Press 2022), was a number one bestseller in its pre-order period and has since been released in Kindle and audiobook forms. She is currently working on her follow up to be released in the not too distant future.

08/22/2024

“Ásbyrgi” by Erin Benton in the Summer 2024 issue of
Erin Benton was born and raised in the southwestern United States, and is currently based in the northeast of Scotland, working on a PhD examining disability in the Old Norse sagas at the University of Aberdeen. She is interested in historical poetry, the supernatural/natural world, and the construction of the body in medieval texts. Her poetry has appeared in The Bangalore Review, Scribendi, and Conceptions Southwest.

08/22/2024

“Call Me By My Name” by Hannah Rodabaugh in the Summer 2024 issue of
Hannah Rodabaugh holds an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Naropa University. She is the author of the forthcoming collection Lost Cathedral (Cornerstone Press) and four chapbooks of poetry. Her work is featured in The Indianapolis Review, Camas Magazine, Glassworks Magazine, and Berkeley Poetry Review. She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and has twice been an artist-in-residence for the National Park Service. She lives in Boise, Idaho, where she teaches at Boise State University and The Cabin Literary Center.

08/21/2024

Detail of “Blur” and “Ternion” by Taylor E. Sloan in the Summer 2024 issue of
Taylor E. Sloan is a photographer native to Jacksonville, Florida, who uses her business, TES Photography (), to capture Florida’s natural worlds and lifestyles. Many of Sloan’s works are featured in literary arts journals such as 3Elements and The Aquarian. Sloan is currently enrolled at Jacksonville University studying visual design.

08/21/2024

“Listen” by Alex Prince in the Summer 2024 issue of
Alex Prince is a poet and novelist. She lives in Shropshire, UK, with her two children, across the river from her girlfriend and her cat Henry. She is currently completing her Master’s in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Through her poetry and storytelling, she examines complicated relationship dynamics, the uncomfortable canvas of “behind closed doors,” and the wonder of the natural world.

08/18/2024

Detail of Anne Kulou’s “Daydream” in the Summer 2024 issue of
Anne Kulou is a self-taught neurodivergent artist, starting to write poetry in childhood as a means to express her rich imaginative mind and her non-dualistic experience of the natural world, deeply intertwined with her inner (sensory, cognitive, and emotional) processes. A few years ago, she discovered photography as a new medium for creative expression, as another way for her to say the unfathomable. She lives in Germany and works as a forensic psychologist (MSc) and trauma sensitive Gestalt therapist.

08/17/2024

Jennifer Browne’s “Double-Crested Cormorant” in the Summer 2024 issue of
Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. She has some poems in chapbooks—Whisper Song (tiny wren publishing, 2023) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Features, 2023)—and journals, including Steel Jackdaw, Gargoyle, and Humana Obscura. She lives in Frostburg, Maryland.

08/16/2024

Detail of “The Precious Quality of Being Alone” by the summer issue’s Featured Artist Elle Bruce

08/15/2024

Excerpt of “Early Morning Paddle” by Elise Chadwick in the Summer 2024 issue of . Read the full piece in the digital issue on our website, link in bio.
Elise Chadwick taught English at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, for 30 years. She lives in NYC but draws much inspiration for her poems from the time she spends upstate in her 200-year-old home coexisting with the deer, groundhog, fox, bats, rabbits and squirrels, who got there first. Her poems have been recently published in The Ocotillo Review, Healing Muse, Naugatuck River Review and The English Journal and others.

08/15/2024

Detail of “Effervescence” by the summer issue’s Featured Artist Elle Bruce.

08/12/2024

Excerpt of “The Water” by Thomas Francis O’Donnell in the Summer 2024 issue of . Read the full piece in the digital issue on our website, link in bio.
Thomas Francis O’Donnell has worked as a bookseller, actor, and librarian. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

08/12/2024

Detail of “Great Lake Vespers” by the summer issue’s Featured Artist Elle Bruce

08/08/2024

Haiku by Debbie Strange in the Summer 2024 issue of

08/08/2024

Detail of “The Thread” by Michael Kunzinger in the Summer 2024 issue of
Michael Kunzinger took up photography as a teenager on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, drawing inspiration for his work from the waters of his home area. His work explores art in nature, with emphasis on that created by water. He has been featured in numerous solo shows, exhibits, and publications, including the Quick Center for the Arts (NY) and others. He is currently president of Arts in the Middle, a nonprofit which promotes the arts locally through an annual fine arts festival and pop-up events. Learn more at mfkunzinger.wixsite.com/home

08/08/2024

“Calling” by Jennifer Perry in the Summer 2024 issue of
Jennifer Perry is a mother, teacher, and poet. She lives in rural Ontario with her family. Perry enjoys writing about nature and is particularly interested in female perspectives.

08/07/2024

Detail of “Enliven” by the summer issue’s Featured Artist Elle Bruce.

08/07/2024

“The Great Egret” by Alex Dawson in the Summer 2024 issue of

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08/06/2024

Detail of “Coastal Forest Reverie” by the summer issue’s Featured Artist Elle Bruce.

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08/05/2024

“Don’t Be Mad” by Miriam Calleja in the Summer 2024 issue of
Miriam Calleja is an award-winning Maltese bilingual freelance poet, nonfiction/fiction writer, ghostwriter, workshop leader, and translator. She is the author of three poetry collections, two chapbooks, and several collaborative works. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and in translation worldwide. She has recently been Highly Commended for a translated poem by the Stephen Spender Trust. Her latest chapbook is titled Come Closer, I Don’t Mind the Silence (BottleCap Press, 2023). Her essays and poems have appeared in platform review, Odyssey, Taos Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Read more on miriamcalleja.com

08/04/2024

Detail of “Every Time I Think of You” by Sarah Garland in the Summer 2024 issue of
Sarah Garland is a photographic artist based in England, UK. The drive behind her practice is the search for beauty and “essence” in the hidden jewels of the natural and urban world around her. Her hope is to create images that inspire people to think and feel deeply, and that connect them to what is beyond themselves. Her work has been published by Humana Obscura and Open Shutter Press, and will be exhibited at PhotoPlace Gallery, Vermont, USA, in July. Find her gallery on Instagram @‌sarahheartsoul.

Address

Santa Cruz, CA

Opening Hours

Monday	6am - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 5pm
Wednesday	8am - 5pm
Thursday	8am - 5pm
Friday	8am - 5pm
Saturday	8am - 5pm
Sunday	8am - 5pm

Website

https://www.humanaobscura.com/

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