Joe Amaral’s first poetry collection, The Street Medic, won the 2018 Palooka Press Chapbook Contest and was published Halloween 2018. Joe works 48-hour shifts as a paramedic on the California central coast, spending days off spelunking outdoors with his young family: camping, hiking, world traveling, and hosting foreign exchange students. His writing has appeared in awesome places like 3Elements Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Panoply, Poets Reading the News, Rise Up Review, and Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award and the 2018 Golden Quill Award for poetry.