Joe Amaral’s poetry collection “The Street Medic” won the 2018 Palooka Press Chapbook Contest. Joe works 48-hour shifts as a paramedic on the California central coast, spending days off adventuring outdoors with his young family: camping, hiking, world traveling, and hosting foreign exchange students. Joe was born and raised on a chicken farm in the East Bay Area. He has a Forestry and Natural Resources degree from Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo with a concentration in watershed, chaparral and fire management. Joe’s writing has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies across the universe such as 3Elements Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Arcadia Magazine, New Verse News, Panoply, Poets Reading the News, Postcard Poems and Prose, Rise Up Review, The Good Men Project, WORDPEACE and Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award and the 2018 Golden Quill Award for poetry. His poem, Epochal, was also a Finalist for the River Heron Poetry Prize.