Leslie Marie Aguilar originally hails from the heartland of Texas. She received her MFA from Indiana University, where she served as the Poetry Editor of Indiana Review. Her work has been supported by the National Society of Arts and Letters and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Hobart, Ninth Letter, Rattle, Sonora Review, and Washington Square Review among others. She is the author of Mesquite Manual (New Delta Review, 2015), and currently works as the Managing Editor for SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, at Rice University.
Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies, selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award, and forthcoming with Alice James Books in January 2024. A 2022 Djanikian Scholar, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently the editor of Palette Poetry and a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. Learn more at sarahgali.com.
Jerilynn Aquino is a Puerto Rican writer from Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Reed Magazine, River Styx, Passages North, and has won the AWP Intro Journals Award for Nonfiction. She received her M.F.A. in Fiction from Temple University and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Creative Nonfiction at Oklahoma State University.
Christine Barkley is an artist and writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing explores themes of chronic illness, trauma, and nature. Christine’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Rust and Moth, and Autofocus, among others.
Diana Cao is a law student living in Cambridge, MA. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Summer Literary Seminars, and was a 2021 finalist in the Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest. Her poetry and fiction have recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere.
B Rivka Clifton is the author of the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). They have work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.
Armen Davoudian’s poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Sewanee Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song (Bull City Press), won the 2020 Frost Place Competition. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
ethan s. evans (they/them) is a poet moonlighting as a simulacrum of a poet. their work has appeared.
William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Offing, and elsewhere. He has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. He lives with himself in Towson, Maryland.
Ezra E. Fitz has worked with Grammy-winning musician Juanes, Emmy-winning journalist Jorge Ramos, and the king of soccer himself, Pelé. His translations of contemporary Latin American literature by Alberto Fuguet, Eloy Urroz, and others have been praised by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and The Believer, among other publications. Fitz has been awarded grants from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA), was a Resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and served as a Peter Taylor Fellow with the Kenyon Review Literary Translation Workshop. He lives with his wife and two children in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
Asha Futterman is a poet and actor from Chicago. She is an MFA student at Washington University.
Vishwas R. Gaitonde’s work has appeared in publications including Mid-American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Iowa Review, The Millions, Santa Monica Review, Gargoyle, and descant. His fiction has also been honored as a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2016.
Wren Hanks is the author of Lily-livered (Driftwood Press), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest, and The Rise of Genderqueer (Brain Mill Press). A 2016 Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow, his recent work appears in Indiana Review, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, New South, and elsewhere. He is an assistant editor for smoke and mold, and lives in Brooklyn, where he works in animal rights.
Amanda Hawkins holds an MFA in creative writing from UC Davis and an MA in theological studies from Regent College. They are a Tin House, Bread Loaf, and Mellon Public Scholar, three-time Pushcart nominee, and winner of the Scotti Merrill Award from Key West Literary Seminar and the Editor’s Prize for poetry at The Florida Review. Their work has been published in Orion, Boston Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Terrain.
Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow was published by Haymarket Books. She is currently editing a Palestinian global anglophone anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2024). She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Follow her on Twitter @MyNrhindi.
Natalie Homer is the author of Under the Broom Tree (Autumn House Press). Her recent poetry has been published in Puerto del Sol, American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Ruminate, Sou’wester, and others. She received an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Anna Hultin is a wife, mama, gardener and artist living in Loveland, Colorado. After receiving a BFA in drawing from Colorado State University, she continued to pursue drawing, sculpture, and installation. Since becoming a mama 6 years ago her work has taken on a new, more flexible form: needle and thread. Her embroideries are inspired by the land; from the vast and rugged landscape of Colorado to the intimacy of her own garden. As a busy, homeschooling mama of three it is a reflective process to sit down and spend time with each hand stitched creation she makes.
Su Hwang is a poet, activist, stargazer, and the author of Bodega (Milkweed Editions), which received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and was named a finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Born in Seoul, Korea, she was raised in New York then called the Bay Area home before transplanting to the Midwest. A recipient of the Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, she is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and the cofounder of Poetry Asylum. She is currently working on her second collection, ARKS.
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She co-organized the performance series Fight for Our Lives and served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House. In 2023, she will be a visiting writer at University of Washington Bothell.
Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai’i. Her work is published or forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Salt Hill, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. she serves as Art and Associate Poetry Editor for The Journal. When not writing, she can be found tending to a jungle of houseplants with her cat, Anakin. Catch her at arahko.com.
Kevin Latimer is an artist. His poems can be found in Ninth Letter, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, & elsewhere. His plays have been produced by convergence-continuum. He co-organizes GRIEVELAND, a poetry project. He has won scholarships, fellowships, & awards from The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland State University, and elsewhere. He is the author of ZOETROPE (2020) & SOUP (2023). He lives in Cleveland, Ohio
Seth Leeper is a queer poet. A 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sycamore Review, River Styx, Salamander, The Account, and Overheard Lit. He holds an M.A. in Special Education from Pace University and B.A. in Creative Writing and Fashion Journalism from San Francisco State University. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn, NY. He tweets @sethwleeper.
Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms, (LSU press, 2021), winner of a 2021 Nautilus Award, and the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU, 2014). Widely published and anthologized, currently she is a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellow for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science and technology. sites.google.com/view/juliablevine
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow. She co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista, which won the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize. Her work has been featured in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, the Adroit Journal, and she has been supported by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Adroit Journal‘s Djanikian Scholarship, and an Undocupoets Fellowship. Born in Xi’an, China, she now lives in Louisiana and is an editor at Graywolf press.
Poet and essayist Susie Meserve is the author of the poetry collection Little Prayers, which won a Blue Light Award and was published by Blue Light Press in 2018, and the chapbook Faith (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Literary Mama, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many literary journals. In 2021-2022 she was a City of Berkeley Civic Arts program grantee, writing about ancestry and motherhood. Originally from New England, she now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015). His work has garnered the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, two NEAs, seven Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. http://www.philipmetres.com
John Milas is a writer from Illinois. His debut novel, The Militia House, will be published by Henry Holt in 2023. His short fiction has appeared in The Southampton Review, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Learn more at johnmilas.com.
Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet. She is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow and a graduate of the Pacific University MFA program in Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Prize and will be released by Elixir Press in February, 2023. Mohassessy’s poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University.
Jane Morton is a queer poet from the South. They completed their MFA at the University of Alabama, where they were Online Editor for Black Warrior Review. They teach English and creative writing at the University of Alabama, and they are a copy editor for Muzzle. Their poems are published or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, West Branch, Boulevard, Ninth Letter, Passages North, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. You can find more at jane-morton.com.
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four poetry collections, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021). A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA), and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine. She lives in Los Angeles.
Born on Oahu, Derek N. Otsuji is the author of The Kitchen of Small Hours (SIU Press, 2021), selected by Brain Turner for the Crab Orchard Poetry Series Open Competition. Recent work has appeared in 32 Poems, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Crazyhorse, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review.
Nome Emeka Patrick is a Nigerian poet. His work has been published or is forthcoming in POETRY, Narrative magazine, AGNI, TriQuarterly, West Branch, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, A Long House, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net, Best New Poets,
| and Pushcart prize nominee, he emerged third place in the Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets, 2020. His manuscript We Need New Moses. Or New Luther King was a finalist for the 2019 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He writes from Providence, Rhode Island where he is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Brown University. Say ‘Hello!’ on Twitter & IG @nome__patrick
Dimitri Psurtsev is a poet and translator who has written five books of poetry (Ex Roma Tertia, Tengiz Notebook, Between, Tired Happiness, and Murka and Other Poems) alongside numerous translations from the English. He teaches at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives with his wife Natalia outside Moscow.
Jemma Leigh Roe has poems and artwork published or forthcoming in The Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Permafrost, Lunch Ticket, The Fourth River, and others. She received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University and is currently at work on a poetry collection about memory, place, and chronic illness.
Yanina Rosenberg (Buenos Aires, 1980) is a pharmacist with a degree in literature. She is the author of Intrusive Skin (La piel intrusa, Páginas de Espuma, 2019), a story collection which was awarded at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. Her stories have been published by international media such as Granta magazine, Trampset, Iowa literaria, Perfil, Revista Ñ/Clarín, winning several literary prizes in Argentina, Perú and Spain. Her debut novel Stockholm Moment was awarded by the Argentine National Fund for the Arts.
T. Dallas Saylor (he/they) is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His work meditates on the body, especially gender and sexuality, against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes. He currently lives in Denver, CO. He is on Twitter: @dallas_saylor.
Fatemeh Shams is the author of two books of poetry in Persian, the first of which won the Jaleh Esfahani Award for the best young Iranian poet in 2012, and a critical monograph in English on poetry and politics, A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford UP). When They Broke Down the Door (Mage), a collection of her poems translated by Dick Davis, won the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award from the Association for Iranian Studies. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry magazine, PBS NewsHour, and the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among other venues. She is currently assistant professor of Modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Naomi Shuyama-Gómez is a writer based in the greater NYC area, on ancestral and unceded Munsee Lenape land. Her fiction and poetry appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, the minnesota review, Mount Hope Literary Journal, Reflex Flash Fiction, and Rigorous Literary Journal. She’s received scholarships/fellowships from Kundiman, Immigrant Writers’ Workshop, CRIT Works LLC., Fine Arts Work Center, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Kelly Sundberg is the author of the memoir Goodbye, Sweet Girl (HarperCollins 2018). Her essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset” was anthologized in Best American Essays 2015, and other essays have been listed as notables. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Slice, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and many other places. She has been the recipient of grants or fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, A Room of Her Own Foundation, Dickinson House, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council. She is an Assistant Professor at Ashland University and lives in Columbus, Ohio with her teenage son.
Taylor Thomas (she/her) is a biracial & bisexual emerging writer from Indiana. Her work has been published or forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, So to Speak Journal, and more. She received the Outstanding Literary Essay award from Voices of Diversity in 2021. She currently attends the University of Notre Dame’s MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in South Bend, Indiana with her husband, Herschel, and her dogs, Bella & Buster.
C.J. Wackerman is a teacher and poet from Fairfield, Connecticut. A recent graduate from Bowdoin College, C.J. is the recipient of the Denning Fellowship and the Nathalie Walker Llewellyn Poetry Prize. C.J. is currently teaching English on a Fulbright Scholarship in Chanthaburi, Thailand.
Dare Williams (he/they) is a Queer HIV-positive poet and literary worker rooted in Southern California. A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, he has received support/fellowships for his work from John Ashbury Home School, The Frost Place, Brooklyn Poets, Breadloaf, and Tin House. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Poets. His work has been featured or forthcoming in Foglifter, Frontier, Kissing Dynamite and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Follow him at Darewilliams.com.
Tara Isabel Zambrano is a writer of color and the author of Death, Desire And Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Best Micro Fiction 2019, 2020 Anthology. She lives in Texas.
Jake Zawlacki is currently an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University. His work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Hamilton Stone Review, and The Citron Review.