Notes on Contributors

Bipin Aurora has worked as an economist, an energy analyst, and a systems analyst. A collection of his stories, Notes of a Mediocre Man: Stories of India and America, was published by Guernica Editions (Canada). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Witness, Boulevard, AGNI, The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, Fiction International, and numerous other publications.

A.A. Balaskovits is the author of Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet and Magic for Unlucky Girls. Winner of the Santa Fe Writer’s Project’s Literary Awards grand prize, her work has been featured in Kenyon Review Online, Best Small Fictions, Indiana Review and others. On twitter @aabalaskovits.

Nikki Barnhart is an MFA candidate in fiction at The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in Juked, The Rumpus, Barnstorm, and elsewhere.

Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022). Her first two books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), were both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is as a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.

Alex Borden is an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. She’s previously worked in reproductive health, conservation, and education. While she’s called Long Island, DC, and Austin home, she currently lives in New York with her dog Bubba. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @omgalexx. 

Andrés Cerpa is the author of The Vault, longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award: Poetry, and Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy from Alice James Books. He was raised in Staten Island, NY. 

Claudia Cortese is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her debut full-length, Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), won Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Award for Emerging Poetry. Her work has appeared in Bitch Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, and The Offing, among others. She recently published the first peer-reviewed article examining the book covers of fat-identifying poets. Cortese received a 2018 OUTstanding Faculty Ally of the Year certificate from the LGBTQ+ Center at Montclair State University and is the Book Reviews Editor for Muzzle Magazine. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio’s Rust Belt and lives in New Jersey.

Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles and lives in Austin, Texas, where he teaches workshops for the Youth Poet Laureate Program. He is the son of a Mexican immigrant and a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. His poems appear or are forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Guernica, Ninth Letter, and POETRY. He is the incoming Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jennifer Marie Donahue’s writing has appeared in Catapult, Dappled Things, The Rumpus, Grist Journal, Cotton Xenomorph, and elsewhere. Her work earned an honorable mention in the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction and was named a finalist for the Barry Hannah Fiction Prize and the So to Speak Nonfiction Prize. She lives in Massachusetts. You can find her online at www.jmdonahue.com

Carlina Duan is a writer-educator from Michigan, and the author of the poetry collections I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) and Alien Miss (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Carlina holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, where she serves as the Poetry Editor for Michigan Quarterly Review. Among many things, she loves river walks, snail mail, and being a sister.

Scott Garson is the author of Is That You, John Wayne?–a collection of stories. He’s had work in/on Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions and others.

​​Rebecca Ruth Gould (https://rrgould.hcommons.org) is the author of the poetry collection Cityscapes (2019) and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (2016). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian, including After Tomorrow the Days Disappear (2016) and, with Kayvan Tahmasebian, High Tide of the Eyes (2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded the Creative Writing New Zealand Flash Fiction Competition prize in 2019.

Neal Hammons‘s short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and Kenyon Review Online. He graduated from the University of Florida’s MFA program for fiction.

Janice N. Harrington’s latest book of poetry is Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (BOA Editions). She teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.

Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (forthcoming, Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Driftwood Press.

Amanda Hope lives in eastern Massachusetts with her partner and cats. A graduate of Colgate University and Simmons College, she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Lickety-Split, Palette Poetry, Small Orange Journal, Stirring Lit, and more. Her chapbook, The Museum of Resentments, was published by Paper Nautilus in 2020. You can find out more at her website, http://www.amandahope.net.

Cathy Mellett is an artist and writer whose stories and essays have appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A former Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellow in Fiction, she now resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. She is the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press 2023). Her poems can be found in the Baltimore Review, Hobart Pulp, Lantern Review, New Orleans Review, and the Offing.

øjeRum is a Copenhagen-based collage artist and music maker. You can find more original hand cut artwork on Instagram @øjeRum or online at linktr.ee/Oejerum.

Triin Paja is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a recipient of the Betti Alver Literary Award, the Juhan Liiv Poetry Prize, and the Värske Rõhk Poetry Award. Her English poetry has received a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is appearing in Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and elsewhere.

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of two poetry collections, Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Novena (winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize, Pleiades Press, 2017), as well as a chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Chad Walsh Series, Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Raised in Maine, he lives in San Francisco.

Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award (2017); Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (2022). Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and will be included in the forthcoming Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review.

As a migrant from Iran to India during the Mughal period, Sa’eb Tabrizi (1592-1676) used his fascination with Indian poetics to introduce new metaphors into the Persian lexicon.

Kayvan Tahmasebian (https://poets.org/poet/kayvan-tahmasebian) is a poet, translator, literary critic, and the author of Isfahan’s Mold (2016) and Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (2019). His poetry was a finalist for The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts in 2017. With Rebecca Ruth Gould, he is co-translator of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019) and House Arrest: Poems by Hasan Alizadeh (Arc Publications, 2022).

Preeti Vangani grew up in Mumbai, India and is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions, 2019), selected as winner of the RL Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Hobart among other journals, and has been supported by Ucross, Djerassi and California Center for Innovation. She is the recipient of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. An alumni of the program, she teaches at the MFA program at University of San Francisco. Preeti is currently working on a manuscript of poems and a collection of short stories.

Rachael Lin Wheeler’s work appears in The West Review, Ghost City Review, and SOFTBLOW, among others. A 2020 and 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, finalist for Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Brett Elizabeth Jenkins and Majda Gama Editors’ Prizes, and recipient of the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholarship from Washington University in St. Louis, RL can be found on Twitter @rachaellin_ or at rachaellinwheeler.com.

David E. Yee is an Asian American writer whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI Online, Seneca Review, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. In 2017, he won the New Ohio Review Fiction Contest, judged by Colm Tóibín, as well as the Press 53 Flash Contest judged by Jeffrey Condran. He’s a bartender in Columbus, Ohio.

Ahmed Zaid was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to an Egyptian father and Yemeni mother. Growing up, he oscillated between Egypt & the United States. He is a Poet and a Soccer Coach. His work rustles with the double-consciousness of Arab Americans and the blurs of undefined/warful home.

Danielle Batalion Ola is a Filipina storyteller, born and raised on the island of Kaua’i. She is a 2019 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow and a 2020 Tin House Scholar. When she’s not hammering away at her own work, you can find her editing essays over at No Tokens. Her stories have been featured in Epiphany Magazine, AAWW’s The Margins, The Common, and elsewhere.

Sahalie Angell Martin is an Oregon native currently residing in Columbus, OH. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and is a current MFA in Fiction candidate at The Ohio State University. She has work in Hobart After Dark, No Contact, The Offing, and Writer’s Digest, and you can find more of her writing at sahalieangellmartin.com.