Contributors

Jay Aelickis a birdwatcher, disc golfer, tarot reader, and sometimes even poet. Their work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ligeia Magazine, the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, sinking city, Okay Donkey, Common Ground Review, and elsewhere. They are 1/2 of the English Club Podcast, where they critique infamous books as if they had been submitted to a fiction workshop.

Nikki Barnhart is Interviews and Reviews editor and a third year MFA candidate in Fiction at OSU.

Benjamin Bartu is a poet & writer. He is the author of the chapbook Myriad Reflector (2023), runner-up for the Poetry Online Chapbook Contest. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and his writing has appeared in The Journal, nat.brut, Guesthouse, Adroit Journal, & elsewhere. He lives in Oakland, California.

Jai Hamid Bashir is a Pakistani-American artist with work published in American Poetry Review, POETRY, Arkansas International, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and Guernica. She has earned numerous accolades, including an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize, and The Linda Corrente Memorial Prize at Columbia University. Her work has also received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and has been featured in The Best of the Net anthology. Jai is a graduate of The University of Utah and Columbia University and resides in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023). Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker andPloughshares, among other publications. On Twitter (@GabrielleBates) and IG (@gabrielle_bates_)

Cameron Bocanegra is a queer Latina and Texan lucky enough to write for a living in the beautiful Austin, Texas.

Chen Chen is the author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions), a best book of 2022 according to the Boston Globe, Electric Lit, and others. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions), was long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award and won the 2018 Thom Gunn Award. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast, and Antioch.

Jona Colson’s poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the 2018 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He is also the co-editor of This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (2021). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review and elsewhere. His translations and interviews can be found in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Writer’s Chronicle. He is a professor of ESL at Montgomery College and lives in Washington, DC.

Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow‘s poetry collections include: Horn Section All Day Every Day, and The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor, (Salmon, 2018 and 2012, respectively); chapbook, Old School Superhero Loves a Good Wristwatch (Dancing Girl, 2014). “>Her poetry has appeared or forthcoming in: Plume Poetry Anthologies Volumes 5 and 7; Drawn to Marvel Anthology: Poems From the Comic Books, Not a Muse Anthology, Even the Daybreak: 35 Years of Salmon Poetry; The American Journal of Poetry, American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Fourteen Hills, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Ilanot Review, Jet Fuel Review, Levure Litteraire, Live Encounters 11th Int’l. Anniversary Edition, Salamander, Smartish Pace, South Dakota Review, Texas Review, and Verse Daily, among other venues. She is at work on her third full length poetry collection.

Xander Gershberg(he/him) is a poet, editor, and educator. His poetry is found or forthcoming at FENCE, Plume, TAB Journal, Inverted Syntax, Great River Review, Poetry Online, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor for MAYDAY and on Spout Press’s editorial collective. He holds an MFA from Virginia Tech.

Elizabeth Heald’s writing has appeared in Five On The Fifth, The Fiction Pool, Timberline Review, and elsewhere. She earned honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest and was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Dave Housley is the author of four novels and four story collections, most recently the novel The Other Ones. He is one of the founding editors and all-around do-stuff people at Barrelhouse, and the primary organizer of the Barrelhouse conference Conversations and Connections: Practical Advice on Writing. He is the Director of Web Strategy at Penn State Outreach and Online Education. He can be found online at housleydave dot com.

Shane Inman’s work appears in The Forge, Bourbon Penn, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in the southwest and lives in Philadelphia.

Faith Henley Padgett is a poet, educator, and maker. She currently teaches for the Museum of Children’s Art, and has previously taught for the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and Milk Press of the Poetry Society of New York. She co-directed the 2021 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, and her work has appeared in The Western Humanities Review, Hanging Loose, Permafrost, and Red Cedar Review, among others. After earning her MFA from Sarah Lawrence and BA from the University of Pennsylvania, Faith has relocated to San Francisco, unceded to the Muwekma, Ohlone, & Ramaytush people, where she gets inky running letterpresses and fiddling with type. 

Isaac Pressnell‘s poems have appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, and many other publications. He lives with his wife and daughter in Georgetown, TX where he works for the Texas Workforce Commission

Leanna Petronella’s debut poetry collection, The Imaginary Age, won the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, Birmingham Poetry Review, CutBank, Quarterly West, and other publications. Her nonfiction appears in Brevity and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and her fiction appears in Drunken Boat. She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. She lives in Austin, Texas. Visit her website at https://leannapetronella.com/

Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai’i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and the chapbook Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2025). Her work is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, Waxwing and elsewhere. Arah has been nominated for Best of Net and Best New Poets and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the Ohio State University where she served on the staff of The Journal. Arah is currently on staff at Surging Tide Magazine. Catch her at arahko.com.

Cameron McLeod Martin is an essayist and poet living in Moscow, Idaho. Their work has previously appeared in Fence, Sonora Review, Afternoon Visitor, & Change, and elsewhere. They hope you have a wonderful day.

Kirsten is a Memphis native. She is a student at the University of Memphis. She has previously been published in the Red Cedar Review.

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.

Jess Smith is the author of Lady Smith (forthcoming from University of Akron Press). Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University.

Madeline Augusta Turner‘s writing and work are centered around soil and hope. She is currently living and writing on a farm in central Ohio. Read more at madelineaugustaturner.com and say hello anytime on Instagram @madelineaugusta

Talia Weisz is the author of two chapbooks, Sisters in Another Life (Finishing Line Press) and When Flying Over Water (Plan B Press). Her work appears in Empty House Press, Atticus Review and The Manifest-Station. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Hannah Nahar is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator currently based in Columbus, Ohio. Their work can be found in Mississippi Review, Electric Literature, Passages North, and elsewhere. Hannah is completing an MFA in Poetry at Ohio State, where they teach writing and edit The Journal.

Nikki Barnhart is Reviews and Interviews Editor and a third-year MFA candidate in Fiction at The Ohio State University.

Aysel Basci Aysel K. Basci is a writer and literary translator. She was born and raised in Cyprus and moved to the United States in 1975. Aysel is retired and resides in the Washington DC area. Her writing and translations have appeared in the Columbia Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Adroit Journal, Aster(ix) Journal, Bosphorus Review of Books and elsewhere.

Stephanie Burt‘s latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022); her poems and essays appear in the London Review of Books, Rain Taxi, Raritan, and elsewhere. She is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard.

Christine Byrne is a writer and visual artist from Connecticut. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she won the John Logan Poetry Prize. Her most recent work is forthcoming in the New England Review, Best New Poets, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.

Abigail Carlson was raised in Ohio and received her M.F.A. from New Mexico State University. Her work has previously appeared in the Rappahannock Review, and she lives with her partner and dog in southeastern Ohio, where she works from home, writes distastefully sad stories, and gasps, “Oh, a bluebird!” every time she sees a bluebird.

Christopher Chambers has lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, and currently works as an editor in Wisconsin. He’s the author of two books of fiction, Delta 88 and Kind of Blue, and his work has appeared in The Southern Review, Fence, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Best American Mystery Stories, and elsewhere.

Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her prior book of poems received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech.

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series (UGA Press, 2017). Her second book, through a small ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2020). Her third collection I, Divided, is forthcoming from LSU Press in November 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta.Her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of four poetry volumes including, most recently, the book-length poem, Midwhistle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). His other poetry collections are: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016); Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019); and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one edition titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018). and lives in Endwell New York with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their goldendoodle, Sunny.

Cristi Donoso is an Ecuadorian American writer whose work has been published by The Threepenny Review, The Cincinnati Review, PANK, Catapult, and others. She was a 2021-2022 PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence and a 2022 Best of the Net finalist. Her first collection of poetry was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize at University of Notre Dame Press. Born in Quito, she lives with her family outside Washington, DC.

Mara Hampson is a queer artist living in the Boston area. They dabble in various mediums, such as podcasting, polymer clay, and watercolors.

Abbie Kiefer‘s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and other places. She was a 2022 and 2023 semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize. Find her online at abbiekieferpoet.com.

Jay Kophy is a Ghanaian poet and the author of Maceration (African Poetry Book Fund / Akashic Books, 2023) and Walking on Water (Library of Africa and the African Diaspora / Light Factory Publications, 2021). His poems have been featured and are forthcoming in literary magazines such as AGNI, Lolwe, FourWay Review, Indianapolis Review, Glass Poetry, Tampered Press, and many others. He is also the first prize recipient of the 2020 Samira Bawumia Literature Prize in poetry and a co-founder and managing editor for the Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series (CGWS).

Christine Lai grew up in Canada and lived in England for six years during graduate studies. She holds a PhD in English Literature from University College London. Landscapes was shortlisted for the inaugural Novel Prize. Christine currently lives in Vancouver.

Sharon Lin is a poet and essayist. Her work appears and is forthcoming in The New York Review of Books, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, The Offing, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

Tingyu Liu was born in Huaian, China, grew up in Miami, and has worked across Los Angeles, Munich, and Cambridge, MA in the life sciences. Her poetry has been published in The Normal School, Four Way Review, Borderlands, Bodega, and elsewhere. She has degrees from Pomona College and MIT.

Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. His debut collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2023) was the winner of the 2021 Yale Younger Poets Prize and the 2023 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review and other publications.

Jamaal May is the author of Hum and The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books). Individual poems appear nationally and internationally, being translated into multiple languages. He is the recipient of numerous honors including The Spirit of Detroit Award, The Benjamin Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, and two finalist nods for the NAACP Image Award. Jamaal hopes his work can serve as a bridge between interior landscapes and various communities.

Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about the influence of personal and collective histories on how we experience place. Freesia’s writing practice includes poetry, hybrid-genre work, lyric essay, memoir, flash fiction, book reviews, and literary criticism. Freesia grew up in Milwaukee, earned an MFA in poetry at Florida International University, and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She welcomes you to connect with her at freesiamckee.com.

Charlie Peck is from Omaha, Nebraska and received his MFA from Purdue University. His poetry has appeared previously in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. His first collection, World’s Largest Ball of Paint, is the winner of the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press and is forthcoming April 2024.

Deon Robinson is a third year MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Afro-Latino momma’s boy from Bronx, NY. He has poems upcoming in The Journal and the Southeast Review. He has received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, the Hurston Wright Foundation for Black Writers, and the Dream Yard Radical Poetry Consortium.

Andie Sheridan is a trans Chinese American poet currently living in Boston. He is a MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he explores a poetic practice interested in creating new forms as a way of creating new queer worlds. Andie’s work has been featured in Hobart Pulp, Mass Poetry, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others.

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born, Palestinian-American writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.

Mary Simmons is a queer writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she is the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from One Art, Moon City Review, tiny wren lit, Yalobusha Review, Whale Road Review, and others.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) was a Turkish poet, novelist, literary scholar and essayist, widely regarded as one of the most important representatives of modernism in Turkish literature. He was a professor of aesthetics, mythology and literature at the University of Istanbul. Although he died 60 years ago, his writing and poetry remains very popular. His novel, The Time Regulation Institute, is considered one of the best novels in Turkish literature. With this novel, Tanpınar became one of the two Turkish novelists whose works are published by Penguin Classics.

Gina Twardosz (she/her) is a writer based in Chicago, IL. Her work is exceedingly personal, often satirical, and with an eye cast to the side for the strange or whimsical. She writes across genres, often melding them, with a body of work that boasts CNF, poetry, flash, and hybrid pieces. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. When not writing, she can be found watching movies with her cat, Radar.

Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest projects are Fugue: An Aural History, out now from New Michigan Press, and Otherwise: Essays, selected by Lia Purpura for the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize, out now from Autumn House.

Lee Welch creates gestural, atmospheric paintings that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of his chosen subjects and map out delicate negotiations between beauty, desire, and the painted image. Depicting figures from his own milieu, as well as from history, literature, music, and tennis, Welch finds feeling in that which he depicts, always rendered with the intensity of his particular humanism; a close looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist reveals the universal feelings that connect us to each other, and that stretch from our present moment back through time. Born in Kentucky and based in Dublin, Welch’s work has been featured in numerous institutions including Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

王潇/Evan Wang is the first Youth Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Rust + Moth, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, and elsewhere. He is the 2023 Jacklyn Potter Young Poet and the editor-in-chief of Hominum Journal. His work has been featured at and recognized by Button Poetry, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Wawa Welcome America.

Rose Zinnia (she/they) is an autistic lesbian writer, editor, & designer living in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the recipient of the 2022 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Poetry, the 2022 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets, & the 2021 Kraft-Kinsey Award/Residency from the Kinsey Institute. Her poetry manuscript, anarchic womb, was a finalist for the 2022 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Sycamore Review, Split This Rock, Gulf Coast, The Academy of American Poets, Ninth Letter, & West Branch, among others. Her work has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop (Poetry) & the Tin House Summer Workshop (Fiction). She has taught creative writing & literary editing/publishing at Indiana University.

Tina Zhu writes from NYC. Her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Sundog Lit, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, among other places. She can be found at tinaszhu.com.

M Jaime Zuckerman is the author of two poetry chapbooks, most recently Letters to Melville (Ghost Proposal, 2018) and the co-translator of My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). Her essays and poems appear in Houseguest, Grist, Fairy Tale Review, Hunger Mountain, Palette, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of a 2020 St. Botolph Society Emerging Artist award and has had her work featured in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. M Jaime grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston, MA.

GENEVIEVE ABRAVANEL’s short fiction is available or forthcoming in The Missouri Review, American Short Fiction, North American Review, The Normal School, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

JEANETTE BEEBE’s poems have appeared in Salamander, Sixth Finch, Chattahoochee Review, Juked, Bayou Magazine, New South, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, and she was a member of Minneapolis/St. Paul’s first spoken word team at Brave New Voices. She lives in Akron, Ohio. Her website is www.jeanettebeebe.com.

DANIEL BIEGELSON is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). He currently serves as Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University and as an editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from DIAGRAM, Interim, MAYDAY, New Orleans Review, Supersition Review, The Glacier & The Shore, among other places.

MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of ALMANAC OF USELESS TALENTS (CLASH Books, 2022) & SYNTHETIC JUNGLE (Northwestern University Press, 2023). Tapped to edit Lambda Literary’s Emerge anthology, their poems have been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net & the Pushcart Prize. They were awarded the Poetry Project’s Brannan Prize & edit poetry at Fence.

ALLISA CHERRY Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Maine Review, Nine Mile Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Rust + Moth, High Desert Journal, and The Baltimore Review, and has received pushcart and best of the net nominations. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she completed her MFA at Pacific University, teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the United States, and is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review. 

QUINTIN COLLINS (he/him) is a writer, assistant director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program, and a poetry editor for Salamander. He is the author of The Dandelion Speaks of Survival and Claim Tickets for Stolen People, selected by Marcus Jackson as winner of The Journal‘s 2020 Charles B. Wheeler Prize. Quintin’s other awards and accolades include a Pushcart Prize, the 2019 Atlantis Award from the Poet’s Billow, and Best of the Net nominations.

ADAM DAY is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. His work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, The Progressive, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.

NATHAN ERWIN is a land-based poet raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. A community organizer, Erwin currently operates at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for indigenous farmers and organizing around land repatriation. His writing has recently appeared in Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, FOLIO, Bombay Gin, Rust & Moth, and Poet Lore. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about land, drugs, myths, and wanting.

CLARE FLANAGAN is a Brooklyn-based poet, music writer, and night owl. Raised in Minnesota, she recently relocated from San Francisco to New York City, where she is a Wiley Birkhofer fellow at NYU. Her poems and reviews are published or forthcoming in Pidgeonholes, Poetry Online, Alien Magazine, The McNeese Review, and Treble Zine. In her free time she enjoys running, eating chopped cheeses, and listening to Charli XCX. 

LIZ HARMS is a poet and intersectional feminist from Arkansas. She earned her MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she now serves as the Managing Editor for Ninth Letter. Harms’ manuscript, Object, was named by Juan Felipe Herrara as a finalist for the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry from California State University, Fresno and Anhinga Press. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, 3Elements Review, Noble / Gas Qtrly, and Duende.

K JANESCHEK is a writer and labor organizer originally from the Midwest. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Foglifter, Nimrod International Journal, HAD, Variant Lit, Split Rock Review, Poet Lore,  and elsewhere, and has won an AWP Intro Journals Project award in poetry. They live in Alaska.

RACHEL KAUFMAN is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate in Latin American and Jewish history. Her work explores diasporic memory and transmission, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-ethnic networks of female religious ritual in colonial Mexico City. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews alongside the poet’s own family histories. Her chapbook, And after the fire, won the 2020 JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize and is grounded in the language and myth of the Talmud. Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, and Comedia Performance: Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. She is currently a poet-in-residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM.

LEYNA KROW is the author of the short story collection I’m Fine, But You Appear To Be Sinking (Featherproof Books 2017) and the novel Fire Season (Viking 2022), which was nominated for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her second story collection, Sinkhole & Other Inexplicable Voids (Viking), is forthcoming in 2024. She lives in Spokane, WA with her husband and two children.

SARAH E. KRUSE is an Associate Editor at Barrow Street Press. She received her MFA in poetry in 2022 from the University of San Francisco under the direction of D. A. Powell, and a doctorate from the University of Rhode Island in 2016. Her work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Shining Rock Poetry Review, Assay: a Journal of Nonfiction Studies, The International Journal of Žižek Studies, and others. She lives in San Francisco.

DELILAH MCCREA (she/her) is a trans-anarchist poet. She loves the NBA and knows the lyrics to every Saintseneca song. Her work can be found in Vagabond City, Gordon Square Review, Petrichor, Night Coffee Lit, Hobart After Dark and on her website https://dtmccrea.wordpress.com/

NICK MOLBERT Originally from Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas now lives and writes in Cincinnati. He is the author of two chapbooks: Goodness Gracious (Foundlings Press, 2019) and Cocodrie Elegy (Foundlings Press, 2023). You can find his work at places like The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, and Missouri Review among others.

SEBASTIÁN H. PÁRAMO is the author of the forthcoming collection Portrait of Us Burning (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2023). His work has recently appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of The Boiler, Poetry Editor for Deep Vellum, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.

ANNA LAURA REEVE is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She was a finalist in the 2023 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest and the 2022 Ron Rash Award, and is a two-time Pushcart nominee. She lives and gardens near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.

PETE STEVENS is the author of the chapbook Tomorrow Music (Map Literary, 2021). His story “Riders” won the Craft Literary Short Fiction Contest, judged by Robert Lopez. His fiction has appeared in AGNI and Copper Nickel, has been named as a Best American Short Stories Distinguished Story, and has been anthologized in Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2023). He can be found online @petebiblio and at petestevensfiction.com.

LAURA SWEENEY facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in sixty plus journals and twelve anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. These docupoems are based upon research she conducted while working for the Ames Laboratory Dept. of Energy. She is a PhD candidate, English Studies/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.

MATTHEW TUCKNER received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and will be a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah beginning in the fall. He was the winner of the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Prize, selected by Paige Lewis, and was a finalist for the 2023 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, and Poetry Daily, among others.

MEGHAN LOUISE WAGNER lives and teaches in Northeast Ohio. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming such places as Nashville Review, Cutleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, Story, Okay Donkey, AGNI, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories.

STELLA WONG is the author of Spooks, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Pcrize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Wong’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, the LA Review of Books, and more.

BRANDON YOUNG (pronouns: he, him) is a PhD student in creative writing at University of Utah, and is Associate Poetry Editor of Quarterly West. He holds a BA from Indiana University, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University where he was the Larry Levis Poetry Fellow. He has attended Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar in poetry at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Foglifter and elsewhere. His poems have been anthologized in A Flame Called Indiana: New Writing from the Crossroads (Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2023).

César Dávila Andrade (Cuenca, 1918—Caracas, 1967) was an Ecuadorian poet, short fiction writer, and essayist. He was known as El Fakir for both his physical appearance and the mystical and esoteric concerns of his work. His chronicle of atrocities and forced labor under Spanish rule, “Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas,” is widely acclaimed, both critically and popularly, as a key text of 20^th century Ecuadorian poetry. His telluric masterpiece, “Feral Cathedral” (1951), appeared almost contemporaneously with Pablo Neruda’s “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” in Canto General (1950). Had “Feral Cathedral” achieved more than scant diffusion on its publication in Venezuela, it may have garnered a share of the fame and accolades that Neruda’s poem has justly earned.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.  She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, among others. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appeared on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel, VH1 and many others. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust.”

Sébastien Luc Butler is a Poe/Faulkner fellow in poetry at the University of Virginia. His writing has been featured in The Michigan Daily, The RC Review, and is forthcoming from Southern Indiana Review. Sebastien is the recipient of the 2021 Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan. He hails from Dexter, Michigan and currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Willow James Claire (James O’Leary) is a trans poet from Arizona. Their work has been nominated for both the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in such journals as Frontier, Protean, The Indianapolis Review, Foglifter, and more. Willow holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and currently serves as a poetry reader for ANMLY.

Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked, winner of the 2018 Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. Her new poems appear in or are forthcoming from the New Yorker, American Poetry Review and the Academy of American Poets’ anthology 100 Poems that Matter. Katie is an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University. 

Maggie Graber is a queer poet from the Midwest and the author of Swan Hammer (MSU Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and a nominee for a 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award. Her work has appeared in South Dakota Review, RHINO, The Louisville Review, Southern Indiana Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Oxford, MS, where she is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi. She loves photosynthesis.

Amanda Gunn’s debut poetry collection is Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, published by Copper Canyon Press (2023). Her poetry appears recently in Poetry, Narrative Magazine, and LARB Quarterly Journal. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian-American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review and a contributing writer and critic at MovieWeb. She is a six-time Best of the Net nominee, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and runner-up for the Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize. Her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com

Brett Hanley is a Poetry Editor for Southeast Review. She holds an MFA from McNeese State and is a PhD candidate at Florida State. Their work is forthcoming or has recently been published in West Branch, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, THE BOILER, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She was a semi-finalist for the 2022 92Y Discovery Contest and has received support from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Joel Hans was once called a saguaro cactus in disguise. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, West Branch, No Tokens, The Journal, Booth, and others. He edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe, and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson, Arizona with his family, and can be found online on Twitter @joelhans or at joelhans.com.

Brian Henry is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Permanent State (Threadsuns, 2020), and the prose book Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation (Parlor, 2022). He has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008), Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers (BOA Editions, 2015), and five books by Aleš Šteger. His work has received numerous honors, including two NEA fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and the Best Translated Book Award.

Eve Kenneally is a Brooklyn-based writer, etc. Eve’s poems have appeared in THRUSH, Peach Mag, Salt Hill, and other places.

Alexa Luborsky is a writer of Western Armenian and Eastern European Jewish descent. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, and West Branch, among others. She was runner-up for the 2022 Quarterly West annual poetry prize. Currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia, she is the interviews editor at Poetry Northwest. You can find more of her work at alexaluborsky.com.

Maya Marshall is the author of the poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love. She cofounded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Her writing has been published in Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Best New Poets, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Adelphi University.

Weijia Pan is a poet and translator from Shanghai, China. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, from AGNI, Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Boulevard, and elsewhere. A winner of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Houston.

Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell, she is an associate professor of creative writing at Cal Poly. She also translates contemporary Polish poetry.

Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) published more than 50 books of poetry in Slovenia. Translated into over 25 languages, his poetry received numerous awards, including the Jenko Prize, the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Mladost Prize. In the 1990s, he served for several years as the Cultural Attaché for the Slovenian Embassy in New York, and later held visiting professorships at various universities in the U.S.

Jonathan Simkins is the translator of El Creacionismo by Vicente Huidobro (The Lune), The Treasure of the Llanganates by Paúl Puma (Pumaeditores), and Feral Cathedral: Selected Poetry of César Dávila Andrade (in progress). His translations have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Nashville Review, Western Humanities Review, and others.

Philip James Shaw creates communications on behalf of organizations dedicated to equity and access in health and education. They write and paint and live with their partner and dog child in Port Townsend, Washington. 

A singer, songwriter, poet, and essayist, Ephraim Scott Sommers is the author of two books: Someone You Love Is Still Alive (2019) and The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (2017). For more words and music, please visit: http://www.ephraimscottsommers.com.

Jace Raymond Smellie earned his MFA in poetry at George Mason University. Originally from Pocatello, Idaho, Jace is a descendent of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He was awarded a 2021 MFA Travel Fellowship from The Alan Cheuse Center for International Writers, and his recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Passages North, Ocean State Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere.

Chris Stuck is the author of Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, published in July 2021 by Amistad/HarperCollins. He was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Oregon Book Award, and is a Pushcart Prize winner. His work has been published in various literary journals.

Avia Tadmor was born in Jerusalem. Her poetry received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop Series, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, New England Review, The Adroit Journal, Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, Avia was named a Gregory Djanikian Scholar by the Adroit Journal. She is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University’s Expository Writing Program.

Born in Puerto Rico, John Yohe has worked as a wildland firefighter, wilderness ranger and fire lookout. Best of the Net nominee x2. Notable Essay List for Best American Essays 2021 and 2022.  @thejohnyohe www.johnyohe.weebly.com

Hua Xi is a writer and artist. They have written poetry for several years and recently began writing short stories. 

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.

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.

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.

Sean Cho A. is the author of “American Home” (Autumn House 2021) winner of the Autumn House Press chapbook contest. His work can be future found or ignored in Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, among others. Sean is a graduate of the MFA program at The University of California Irvine and a PhD Student at the University of Cincinnati. He is the Editor in Chief of The Account. 

Cynthia Amoah is a spoken word poet, educator, and mentor originally from Ghana. She completed her MFA at The New School where she was cited for Excellence in Poetry and has been featured on the stages of TEDxDrewUniversity, TEDxOhioStateUniversity, and the United Nations Information Center in Accra, among many. Cynthia’s writing and performances often concern the foraging questions that have to do with identity and belonging, with displacement, migration and uprootedness. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in OURS Magazine, Nimrod Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets Chapbooks by Akashic Books. Cynthia currently resides in Columbus, OH with her family where she facilitates workshops in poetry, positive-thinking, confidence-building, and the power of using our voice. 

Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is now a PhD candidate and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, and her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in Spring of 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.

A Pushcart Prize-winning Black author, AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Salamander, The Florida Review, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, The Sun Magazine, Puerto Del Sol, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. A six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, he is originally from the Bronx, NY and now lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he advocates for the relationship between mental health and bodybuilding. He can be found on Instagram @the_fit_poet. 

Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati.

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.  She is the 2022 recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council statewide individual artist award, the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize, a Cave Canem fellow, and the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series Curator and Poetry Programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. 

James “dirtkics” Dickerson is a photographer who has documented Toledo, Ohio since the late 2010’s. His work emerges through the language of a neighborhood with a focus on Black and Brown communities alike.

Dionne Custer Edwards is a writer, educator, and the Director of Learning & Public Practice at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She also founded the award-winning art and writing program Pages. Dionne has published critical and literary writing, internationally and nationally in Sanat Dünyamiz (“Our Art World”), Turkey; Journal GEARTE, Brazil; and in the University of Arizona’s Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Her literary work has appeared in 3Elements Review, Barren Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Flock, Gordon Square Review, Grist, Porter House Review, Storm Cellar, The Seventh Wave, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. Dionne is co-editor of a book series, forthcoming, to be published by Ohio State University Press, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities.

​​Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren & a teaching artist for Center For Arts Inspired Learning and The Westside Community Sisterhood Project in conjunction with the Anisfieldwolf Foundation. She is a 2022 Catapult fellow with Cleveland Public Theater. In 2021 she filmed a commercial for the Cleveland Museum of Art & participated with #teamyellowbrickroad for the Black Joy Experience. She is a 2021 Premier Playwright fellow recipient with Cleveland Public theater. She is a 2020 WateringHole Manuscript fellow, a 2018 winter tangerine chapbook fellow and a 2018 Poetry Foundation incubator fellow. Her work appears in, The Offing, BOAAT, Tinderbox, Josephine Quarterly and elsewhere. She has toured both nationally and internationally. She is the co-founder of Outsiders Queer Midwest Writers Retreat. A two time pushcart prize nominee, chances are she’s by a lake, thinking about Toni Morrison and talking to ghosts. In her spare time she is growing her afro so tall God can use it for a microphone and speak through her. Her first full length manuscript, Urbanshee is available for pre-order with Button Poetry.

Currently a student in Miami University’s MFA program, K Anand Gall also holds an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a creative nonfiction project in which she explores the connections between adoption and health. A recent finalist in The Arkansas International C.D. Wright Emerging Poet’s Prize, K’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in several anthologies, including the award-winning anthology, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, as well as Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Flat Water Stirs, Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts, and Riparian. Find her on twitter @kanandgall.

A writer from Ohio, Geramee Hensley currently lives elsewhere. They edit Sonora Review and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Their work has been featured in Button Poetry, Indiana Review, The Lantern Review, The Recluse, The Margins, decomp, and more. You can find them at geramee.com. 

Manuel Iris (Mexico, 1983). Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio (2018-2020). He received the “Merida” National award of poetry (Mexico, 2009) for his book Notebook of dreams, and the Rodulfo Figueroa Regional award of poetry for his book The disguises of fire (Mexico, 2014). 
In 2016 two different anthologies of his poetic work were published: The naked light, in Venezuela; and Before the mystery, in El Salvador. His first bilingual anthology of poems, Traducir el silencio/Translating silence, was published in New York in 2018. This book won two different awards in the International Latino Book Awards in Los Angeles, California, in that same year. 
Iris has published poetry, essay and translation in magazines and literary journals from Mexico, Spain, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Portugal, France, the United States, and Angola. His poetry has been included in several Mexican, as well as Latin-American, and American, poetry anthologies. He has also given talks, lectures and poetry readings in literary events, academic conferences and cultural centers of Mexico, the United States and Europe. In 2021, he became a member of the prestigious System of Art Creators of Mexico (Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte).
Manuel Iris holds a BA in Latin American Literature from the Autonomous University of the Yucatan (Mexico), a MA in Spanish from the New Mexico State University, and a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Cincinnati, the city in which he lives.

Annie Johnson is an emerging teen writer from the Columbus area, and a member of The Adroit Journal’s 2022 Summer Mentorship class. Annie’s work has been published in The New York Times, Teen Ink Magazine, Flip The Page, the Power of the Pen Winners Book, as well as recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (2021 and 2022), YoungArts and the Interlochen Virginia B. Ball scholarship.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term), Kamara is the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (African Poetry Book Fund/Alashic Books, 2018) and When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017) and the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022). She earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. For more: www.yaylala.com

Amit Majmudar is an internationally published poet, novelist, translator, and essayist, as well as the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. His forthcoming volumes in the United States include Twin A: A Memoir and Black Avatar and Other Essays. A three-volume retelling of the Mahabharata is forthcoming in India. His most recent poetry collection is What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020), and he is currently co-creating a graphic novel, The Mustang Sutra. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children.

Jyotsna Sreenivasan is the author of the short story and novella collection These Americans and the novel And Laughter Fell From the Sky. Both are about Indian Americans, and both include Ohio settings. She received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for 2022, and was selected as a Fiction Fellow for the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies (including Copper Nickel and Sixfold).  She was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She was born and raised in northeast Ohio. Her parents are immigrants from India. She works as a secondary school English teacher in Columbus, Ohio. For information about Jyotsna as well as other writers who are children of immigrants, please see www.SecondGenStories.com.

Dennis James Sweeney is the author of In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press, 2021). His writing has appeared in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, The New York Times, and The Southern Review, among others. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Khaty Xiong is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015), and three poetry chapbooks: Ode to the Far Shore (Platypus Press, 2016), Deer Hour (New Michigan Press, 2014), and Elegies (University of Montana, 2013). Her work has been featured in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Xiong’s honors include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, residencies at MacDowell, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council. Currently, she is working on her second poetry collection, a series of pastoral elegies detailing her grief over the sudden loss of her mother.

Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (2022), I Always Carry My Bones, Iowa Poetry Prize winner (2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (2017). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review,American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Guernica,Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.

Brent Ameneyro’s poetry has been published in Terrain.org, Hispanic Culture Review, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of the following awards: 2019 Sarah B. Marsh Rebelo Excellence in Poetry, 2020 San Miguel Poetry Week Fellowship, and the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice.

Ilana Bean is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Iowa, as well as a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship, Stanley Fellowship Award, and the Englert Nonfiction Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nashville Review, Chicago Review of Books, DIAGRAM, Speculative Nonfiction, and elsewhere.

Kristene Kaye Brown is a mental health social worker. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Winner of the Clayton Prize for poetry, her work has been featured on NPR and published most recently in New South, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Salt Hill, and others. She lives and works in Kansas City.

Ian Cappelli (he, him) has written the chapbook ‘Suburban Hermeneutics’ (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2019). His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Atlanta Review, Terrain.org, SAND, Sugar House Review, SoFloPoJo, and The Los Angeles Review, among others.

Anthony Correale holds an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University and is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He served as Fiction Editor at Cream City Review and Indiana Review. “It Is a Circle, Never Broken” is his first story to appear in print.

c3crew is a school teacher, finder and mender. c3’s poetry has appeared in Spillway, Bodega, and The Sugarhouse, Cincinnati & Gettysburg Reviews. He’s often scheming a return to his Renton, WA coffee shop, in the shadow of the dragon. www.c3crew.com

Laura Donnelly is the author of two collections of poetry, Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press 2020), and Watershed (Cider Press Review 2014), and her new work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, SWWIM, EcoTheo Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and is Director of Creative Writing at SUNY OSwego.

Jordan Escobar is a writer in Jamaica Plain, MA. His work can be found in Zone 3, Willow Springs, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and been the recipient of a fellowship with the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He currently divides his time teaching at Emerson College and Babson College and working as a professional beekeeper.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of Look Alive—a finalist for numerous prizes, including The National Poetry Series, and winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press—along with seven chapbooks, most recently The Undead, winner of Sixth Finch Books’ 2020 Chapbook Contest, and Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in Five Points, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She also serves as editor-in-chief of the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQ+ literary journal Foglifter.

Mary GrandPré is an abstract painter, who lives and works in Sarasota, Florida. She is a former graphic designer, and renowned children’s book illustrator, most recognized for her illustrations for the American-published Harry Potter book series. After working several years in both fields, she found a new freedom and joy in painting abstractly. Today, her paintings continue to tell a story, holding a narrative quality that invites the viewer to explore and discover their own story.

Reuben Gelley Newman is a writer and musician from New York City. His work appears in diode, DIALOGIST, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. He was a Fall 2020 intern at Copper Canyon Press and works in the library at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.

Nora Hikari (she/her) is a transgender poet and artist based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming at Ploughshares, The Shade Journal, Palette Poetry, Gulf Coast, and others. Her chapbook, Girl 2.0, is a Robin Becker Series winner, and is forthcoming at Seven Kitchens Press. She can be found at her website norahikari.com and contacted at norahikariwrites@gmail.com.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer. Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Fence, Blackbird, diode, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer based in Seattle, WA. A semi-finalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize, her poetry is featured/forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Southeast Review, Passages North, BOAAT, Columbia Journal, Poetry Northwest, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. She is working on her first book of poems, Anchor Baby. Find Patrycja on twitter @jej_sen.

Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears in a wide range of literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., Ireland and the U.K., including, among others, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, The Florida Review, Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, Cider Press Review, New York Quarterly, Southword, The Strokestown Poetry Anthology, Live Canon and The Bridport Prize Anthology. He is currently working on a debut poetry collection.

Myra Kamal is a Pakistani-American writer born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She serves as the 2021 Phoenix Youth Poet Laureate. Myra is a three-time Scholastic Art and Writing National Medalist, a Regional American Voices Nominee in poetry, and was published in The Best Teen Writing of 2018. She is also cofounder of the borderline, an online youth literary magazine.

Jessica Kim is a disabled poet from California. A YoungArts Finalist in Writing (Poetry), Commended Foyle Young Poet, and the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, her poems can be found in Frontier Poetry, Wildness Journal, and Waxwing Magazine. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Lumiere Review and Polyphony Lit. Find her at www.jessicakimwrites.weebly.com, @jessiicable on Twitter, or stealing cookies from the cookie jar.

Marisa Lainson is a queer poet and educator based in Southern California. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches writing and serves as the Poetry Editor of FAULTLINE Journal of Arts and Letters. Her poems have recently appeared in Frontier Poetry and Foothill Poetry Journal, where she was a finalist for the 2021 Foothill Editor’s Prize.

Logan Lane is a writer from Ohio with an MFA from the University of Michigan. His fiction is forthcoming in The Common.

Jen Levitt is the author of *The Off-Season*. Her second collection is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023.

Trapper Markelz (he/him) is a husband, father of four, poet, musician, and cyclist, who writes from Boston, Massachusetts. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals Baltimore Review, Stillwater Review, Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, High Shelf Press, Dillydoun Review, and others. You can learn more about him at trappermarkelz.com

Natalie Martell lives in Minneapolis and works as a personal care assistant. She loves trees, painting, and playing guitar. She’s bi and has a cat named Willow. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, SWWIM, Flyway, and elsewhere.

Angelo Mao is a research scientist. He received his PhD in bioengineering from Harvard University. His first book of poems is Abattoir (Burnside Review Press, 2021), and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. He has also written for Opera News and Boston Classical Review.

Peter Money performs with the Vermont based poetry band Los Lorcas. His novel Oh When the Saints, endorsed by Nuala O’Connor, was published by Liberties Press, Ireland. His other books include American Drone: New & Select Poems, Che: A Novella In Three Parts, and translations of Saadi Youssef with Sinan Antoon, Nostalgia, My Enemy. His spoken word album, Blue Square, is available on Apple Music along with Los Lorca’s Last Night In America. In comics, Peter appears as the poet Joey King in Marvel’s Unstable Molecules, The Fantastic Four prequel by James Sturm. RTE aired his radio essay, “Loves: Silence and the music of JS Bach.” Peter directed Harbor Mountain Press for a decade and a half. For more, see petermoney.com, @poetpetermoney (I), @petermoneyhere (T)

Masin Persina’s poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Boulevard, Ninth Letter, Sixth Finch and elsewhere.  He worked at Sony BMG before beginning his career as a high school educator.  He currently teaches writing and rhetoric in the upper school at Making Waves Academy in Richmond, CA.

Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW’s The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Raees’s first chapbook, “Coining A Wishing Tower” won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press and judged by Kaveh Akbar, and will be forthcoming in March 2022. From Lahore, Pakistan, she currently lives between Lahore, New York City, and Miami. Her website is: www.ayesharaees.com

Jessica Reed’s two chapbooks are World, Composed (Finishing Line Press, finalist for the Etchings Press Whirling Prize) and Still Recognizable Forms (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press—forthcoming in 2022). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, Colorado Review, Scientific American, Denver Quarterly, Bellingham Review, New American Writing, Inverted Syntax, Diagram, Pank, Waxwing, Exposition Review, The Fourth River,and elsewhere. https://www.jessicareed.info/

Suzanne Manizza Roszak‘s creative nonfiction has appeared in Hobart, The Pinch, and South Dakota Review; her poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Third Coast, and Verse Daily. Suzanne is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen and a reader for CutBank.

Brian Russell received his MFA from UC-Irvine and has work published or forthcoming in Columbia Journal, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

Sophia Huneycutt holds a degree in English literature from Davidson College and is an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer graduate intensive program. She’s currently an MFA student at The Ohio State University, where she is an associate fiction editor at The Journal. Her fiction has been published in Jabberwock Review and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides from Copper Canyon Press. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her other books include Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, Hourglass Museum, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (coauthored with Martha Silano), and Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State on traditional lands of the Chimacum, Coast Salish, S’Klallam, and Suquamish people where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. Kelli is currently part of a project between local land trusts and artists to help raise awareness for the preservation of land, ecosystems, and biodiversity called Writing the Land.www.agodon.com / www.twosylviaspress.com

Robyn Allers is a former journalist, editor, scriptwriter and copywriter. In 2021, her story “Here We Are” received the first-place award by Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has also appeared in Punctuate, The Southeast Review, Apalachee Quarterly, the anthology Belles’ Letters, numerous magazines and several middle school geology videos. She grew up in Kissimmee, Florida and learned everything there is to know about alligators while working at Owen Godwin’s Gatorland Zoo. She lives and writes in Cocoa Beach, Florida and Queens, New York.

Samuel Amadon’s recent collections are Listener and Often, Common, Some, And Free. He directs the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina, where, with Liz Countryman, he edits the journal Oversound.

V. Batyko (they/them) is a poet from Los Angeles, California. They hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. They are the recipient of the Joan Grayston Poetry Prize from the University of Washington, and the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award from the University of Southern California. Their work has recently been published in Ninth Letter and Unbroken, and they were a finalist for Columbia Journal’s 2019 Winter Contest.

Caleb Braun earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington, where he received the Harold Taylor Prize. He is a PhD student in creative writing at Texas Tech University. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, 32 Poems, Image, Blackbird, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere. He can be found online at calebbraun.com.

Holli Carrell is a Pushcart-nominated writer currently writing and teaching in Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her writing has appeared in 32 Poems, Salt Hill, Bennington Review, Quarterly West, Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, and other places.

Originally from a sunny island in Southeast Asia, Chim Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese currently residing in Australia. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a 2021 Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published/forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, Eunoia Review, Heavy Feather Review and Kissing Dynamite. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.carrd.co

Chloe Cook is an undergraduate student attending Northern Kentucky University. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Loch Norse Magazine, and her writing is featured or forthcoming in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Sledgehammer Lit, Sutterville Review, deathcap, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, entitled Surge, is forthcoming from dancing girl press this spring.

Grace Tessier Culhane is an Ohio-based fiction writer. Her investigative journalism has appeared in Vice. Her arts reporting has appeared in Willamette Week and the East Bay Express. She is currently at work on a novel about DoorDash delivery drivers, cultists, and Angelenos.

Starr Davis is a poet and essayist whose work has been featured in multiple literary venues such as the Kenyon Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, So to Speak and Transition. She is a 2021–2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow and the creative nonfiction editor for TriQuarterly. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York and a BA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Akron. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry and creative nonfiction, Best of the Net and Best American Essays. She works as a poetry mentor and workshop facilitator in Ohio, where she currently lives.

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Passages North, DIAGRAM, Wigleaf, and Pithead Chapel, among others, and recently received an Honorable Mention for Cincinnati Review‘s 2021 Robert and Adele Schiff Awards. She works as an editorial consultant and creative writing instructor in New Jersey and holds an MFA in fiction from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Find her on Twitter @swellspoken and at www.alysondutemple.com.

Jeff Frawley’s short fiction has appeared in a wide range of literary publications, including The Gettysburg Review, Faultline, The Portland Review, South Dakota Review, and Storm Cellar. He lives in the mountains of southern New Mexico, where he serves as Chair of the Department of Language and Fine Arts at Eastern New Mexico University-Ruidoso. 

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.

Mag Gabbert is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books, forthcoming in 2023), winner of the 2021 The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry, which includes the works published here. Her poems can also be found in 32 Poems, Pleiades, The Paris Review Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from Texas Tech University and an MFA from The University of California at Riverside; she’s received poetry fellowships from Idyllwild Arts and Poetry at Round Top; and, in 2021, she was awarded a 92Y Discovery Award. Mag teaches at Southern Methodist University and serves as the interviews editor for Underblong Journal. 

Amanda Gaines is an Appalachian writer and Ph.D. candidate in CNF in Oklahoma State University’s creative writing program. Her poetry and nonfiction are published or awaiting publication in Barrelhouse, Willow Springs, Yemassee, Redivider, New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Juked, Rattle, New South, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Superstition Review.

Margriet Hogue is a mixed media abstract artist living in Alberta. She has her own needlework business designing and reproducing stitched textiles from museums in North America and Europe. Her involvement in the arts has extended into abstract painting and textiles are finding their way into her work.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. His work has been featured in the Adroit Journal, The Offing, Passages North, and elsewhere. If you enjoyed your visit to Tucker Leighty-Phillips’ stories, please sign the digital guestbook at the following link: https://www.tuckerlp.net/guestbook/twostories

Weston Morrow is a poet, essayist, and former print journalist. His recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridian, Lake Effect, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. His visual art has appeared in Ninth Letter. He splits his time between Illinois and Ohio, and can be found on Twitter @WMorrow or at www.westonmorrow.com.

Alicia Mountain is the author of FOUR IN HAND (BOA Editions 2023) and HIGH GROUND COWARD (Iowa 2018), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Adroit Journal, Ploughshares, and The Nation and elsewhere. Mountain is a contributing editor at the Kenyon Review and serves on the Board of Directors for Foglifter. She is a lesbian poet living in New York where she teaches at the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s College. 

Kimberly Nguyễn is a Vietnamese-American diaspora poet current living in New York City. She was a recipient of a Beatrice Daw Brown Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s 2021 OPEN and New Poets Awards. Her work can be found in diaCRITICS, perhappened mag, Hobart, Muzzle Magazine, and others. She was a 2021 Emerging Voices Fellow at PEN America, and she has a forthcoming collection in Fall 2022.

Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí is a writer, literary journalist, and editor from Nigeria. His work has appeared/ is forthcoming in AGNI, Bodega, Southern Humanities Review, Bath Magg, Cincinnati Review, Rust+Moth, Joyland, The Dark, 34 Orchards, Agbowó, the minnesota review, the Kenyon Review, Mooncalves: An Anthology of Weird Fiction, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a BA in History and International Studies at Lagos State University.

Katie Prince is a poet, essayist, and graphic designer. She holds a BA from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In the spring of 2017, she served as artist-in-residence at Klaustrið, in Iceland’s Fljótsdalur valley. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, Fugue, The Adroit Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. You can find her online at www.katieprince.com.

​​Kyle Vaughn’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Shore (2021 Pushcart Prize nomination), A-Minor Magazine, Adbusters, The Boiler, Drunken Boat, Poetry East, Vinyl, and Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions).  He is the author of Lightning Paths: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises and the co-author/co-photographer of A New Light in Kalighat.  www.kylevaughn.org / twitter: @krv75 / insta:  @kylev75 / email:  kylev75@gmail.com

Lucy Wainger is author of the forthcoming chapbook In Life There Are Many Things (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. Her poems appear or will appear in Best American Poetry, DIAGRAM, The Margins, POETRY, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. She grew up in New York City and is currently an MFA candidate at UMass Amherst.

Meredith Whitaker is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. She is a junior in the undergraduate creative writing program at The Ohio State University where she specializes in creative nonfiction. Please reach out to her at Whitaker.221@osu.edu with any inquiries.

Born to an American father and a Japanese mother, Hana Widerman is a writer and English major at Princeton University where she won the Lewis Art Center’s Outstanding Work by an Underclassman Award for Creative Writing. Her work has been recognized by The Poetry Society of the UK and has also appeared in The Washington Square Review. She has always been drawn to writing about language, migration, love, and history. She has moved over ten times, can’t go one meal without tea, and the first poem she remembers writing was a haiku about falling petals.

Liala Zaray is a Pushcart prize nominated MFA candidate at St. Mary’s College. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Tinder Box, BOAAT, and Smartish Pace. You can find her on Instagram through the username @liala_af

George Abraham (they/he) is a Palestinian American poet and PhD candidate at Harvard University. They are a Kundiman fellow, a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and the author of Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020).

Bay Area native and poet, Marissa Ahmadkhani holds an MA in English from Cal Poly SLO. Her work has been published or forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, the minnesota review, Radar Poetry, The West Review, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015 and 2017. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of California, Irvine.

Evelyn N. Alfred is an information professional who works at the Government Publishing Office in Library Services & Content Management. Her writing can be found at Underblong, The Offing, and Lines + Stars. She lives in Maryland with her wife. 

Jacqueline Boucher lives and writes in Alaska, where she serves as the poetry editor for Lammergeier Magazine. A Best New Poets 2020 nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, The McNeese Review, New South, The Rupture, and other magazines. She can be found on Twitter @jacqueboucher.

Despy Boutris‘s writing has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, Southern Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston, works as Assistant Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.

Sam Burt is a poet and cheesemonger who has lived in Iowa City since graduating from Grinnell College with a degree in Russian. His poems may also be found in The Maine Review and Stone Coast Review, as well as forthcoming works in Salt Hill, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Rattle.

Jordan Charlton is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska. He also works with the Nebraska Writers Collective, working with both high school youth poets and incarcerated writers through the programs Louder Than a Bomb: Great Plains and Writers’ Block.

Sean Cho A. is the associate & social media editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal and an MFA candidate at the University of California Irvine. His work can be ignored or future-found in Salt Hill, The Portland Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Sean’s manuscript Not Bilingual was a finalist for the Write Bloody Publishing Poetry Prize.

Brian 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, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.

Brittny Ray Crowell is a native of Texarkana, TX. She received a B.A. in English from Spelman College, and an M.A. in English from Texas A&M-Texarkana. Her work has been published in The West Review, Glass Poetry Press, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered. Her work focuses on hidden mythologies of the contemporary South. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Houston where she serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast.

Satya Dash‘s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Florida Review, Hobart and The Cortland Review, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He is a two-time Orison Anthology and Best New Poets nominee. He spent his early years in Odisha, India and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at: @satya043

Anjali Emsellem is a poet from the Bay Area and founding editor of ATM Magazine (atm-magazine.com). Anjali has self-published two chapbooks, In the Yawn and Animacy Effect, and is published in the Quarterless Review. Anjali’s poems consider what is animate, what is dying, and what has yet to be born.

Sara Femenella‘s poems have been published in Pleiades, The New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Denver Quarterly, Salamander and Rumble Fish Quarterly, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Shelby Handler is a writer, organizer and educator living on Duwamish territory/Seattle, WA. A 2019 Richard Hugo House fellow, their work has been supported by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Gay City Arts, Asylum Arts and the Yiddish Book Center. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Pacifica Literary Review, Homology Lit, 3Elements Review, glitterMOB and the Write Bloody anthology, “We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival.” Follow them @shelbeleh.

Heather Heckman-McKenna is a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, studying and teaching literature and creative writing with a focus on women’s and gender studies. She’s published her creative work in CutBank and Eckleburg, amongst others, and two essays from her in-progress memoir, Finding Orange, were nominated for the Pushcart in 2018 and 2019. “Chroma” is also an essay from her memoir. Heather volunteers her time as a domestic violence advocate and gives talks and readings about domestic and sexual violence. You can reach Heather at heatherheckmanmckenna.wordpress.com.

Katherine Indermaur is the author of the chapbook Pulse (Ghost City Press, 2018), winner of the Black Warrior Review 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize, runner-up in the 92Y’s 2020 Discovery Poetry Contest, and editor for Sugar House Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Coast|NoCoast, the Cortland Review, Entropy, Frontier Poetry, New Delta Review, Oxidant|Engine, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Salt Lake City.

Hannah Kroonblawd is completing a PhD in English Studies at Illinois State University, where she teaches writing courses and serves as the assistant poetry editor for SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review). Also a graduate of the MFA program at Oregon State University, her recent work can be found in Puerto del Sol, Washington Square Review, and Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology.

David Dodd Lee is the author of nine full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), and two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction in Willow Springs, New World Writing, Sou’wester, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. He is also a painter and a collage artist, who often exhibits his work in galleries in the U.S. Recent artwork has also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Permafrost, The Hunger, Pinball, & Twyckenham Notes. He provides illustrations for essays and fiction regularly at The Rumpus. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, photographs, several long original poems, erasures, and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in early 2021. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.

He has been posting work on Instagram since October, 2019 at instagram.com/davidlee2588. Older work appears at Seventeenfingeredpoetrybird.blogspot.com.

Sara Femenella‘s poems have been published in Pleiades, The New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Denver Quarterly, Salamander and Rumble Fish Quarterly, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Susannah Lodge-Rigal holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she was the recipient of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Seneca Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Puerto del Sol, Ruminate, and elsewhere.

John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2015, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and TriQuarterly, among others. He is the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry. John is an Associate Editor at RHINO and lives in Illinois.

Gary McDowell‘s Aflame won the 2019 White Pine Press Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in Fall 2020. He is also the author of five other books, including, most recently, Caesura: Essays (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2017). His new poems are forthcoming in, among others, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Cimmaron Review, and The Colorado Review.

Heather Myers is from Altoona, Pennsylvania. She has an MFA from West Virginia University and is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Palette Poetry, Reservoir, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2018 AWP Intros Awards.

Therí A Pickens, PhD has written two monographs including Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke 2019). You can find her on Twitter (@TAPPhD) and her website (www.tpickens.org). She is a Professor of English.

Katie Pyontek writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has been published in New Ohio Review and Poetry. She is an MFA candidate at Ohio State.

Jessie Roy holds an MFA from Syracuse University and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she serves as Fiction Editor for Cream City Review.  Her fiction has recently appeared in American Literary Review, where it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She grew up in western Kentucky and now lives in Manhattan with her wife.  Find her at www.jessie-roy.com. 

Lubna Safi is a writer and graduate student living in Berkeley, California. Her work has been published in a small number of literary journals including Guernica, TAB: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Exchanges Literary Journal, and is forthcoming an anthology of poetry by Arab American writers.

Brooke Sahni’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines such as Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. She is from Cleveland, Ohio but lives in New Mexico.

Salawu Olajide lives in Nigeria. He is the author of Preface for Living Homeland published under African Poetry Book Fund series and edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. His poems are also available at or forthcoming in Glass, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, Agbowo, Transition, Waccamaw, Miracle Monocle among other venues. 

Rachel Stempel (she/they) is a queer Jewish poet and MFA candidate at Adelphi University. They are a staff writer at Up the Staircase Quarterly and EX/POST MAGAZINE and their work has appeared in/is forthcoming from The Nasiona, New Delta Review, SPORAZINE, Atlantis Magazine, Petrichor, and elsewhere.

Kailey Tedesco is the author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing) and Lizzie, Speak (winner of White Stag Publishing’s 2018 MS contest). Her newest collection, FOREVERHAUS, will be released from White Stag in 2020. She is a senior editor for Luna Luna Magazine, and she teaches an ongoing course on the witch in literature at Moravian College. You can find her work featured or forthcoming in Electric Literature, Conduit, Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, Bone Bouquet Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and more. For further information, please follow @kaileytedesco.

El Williams III is a Cave Canem fellow and MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University. A St. Louis native, he has received fellowships and scholarships from Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Tin House and the Watering Hole. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, River Styx, Shade Literary Arts, Vinyl Poetry and Prose and elsewhere.

Stella Wong is a poet with degrees from Harvard and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Wong’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and the LA Review of Books. She is the author of AMERICAN ZERO (Two Sylvias Press, 2018) and SPOOKS (Saturnalia Books, 2022).

Angelique Zobitz is the author of the chapbook ‘Love Letters to the Revolution’ forthcoming Fall 2020 from American Poetry Journal. She is a Spring 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition Finalist, 2020 Best New Poets nominee and a two-time 2019 Best of the Net nominee. 

Widely published, Zobitz’s work has appeared in Sugar House Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Adirondack Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora, Yemassee Journal, So to Speak, Poets Reading the News, Rise Up Review and many others. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @angeliquezobitz and www.angeliquezobitz.com

Aldo Amparán (http://aldoamparan.com) is a queer poet from the border cities of El Paso, TX, & Ciudad Juárez, CHIH, MX. He is a CantoMundo Fellow & finalist for the Alice James Award. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Fugue, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Washington Square Review & elsewhere.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His books are This Wound Is A World (UMinn Press 2019), NDN Coping Mechanisms (House of Anansi 2019), and the forthcoming A History of My Brief Body (Two Dollar Radio 2020).

Anthony Borruso has an MFA in creative writing from Butler University and is a reader for Split Lip Magazine. He suffers from Chiari Malformation and sometimes examines this in his poetry. Currently, he teaches composition at Tallahassee Community College. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Spillway, Mantis, THRUSH, Frontier Poetry, decomP, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere.

Guy Choate has published or has forthcoming essays in War, Literature, & the Arts, Louisville Review, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, and Cream City Review, among other places. He earned his MFA from The University of New Orleans, where he wrote a thesis about his lifelong relationship with gambling. He’s currently working on a manuscript about his attempt to walk every step from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. Guy directs the Argenta Reading Series in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife, Liz, and their son, Gus. You can find him online at guychoate.com.

J. David is from Cleveland, Ohio and is Editor-in-Chief of Flypaper Lit. They probably love Julien Baker more than you do.

Saddiq Dzukogi is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Poetry Society of America, Gulf Coast, African American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Verse Daily. He has won fellowships from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Ebedi International Writers Residency.

Federico Federici is a physicist, a translator and a writer. He lives and works between Berlin and the Ligurian Apennines. His texts have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Jahrbuch Der Lyrik 2019, Poet Lore, Sand, Trafika Europe, Magma, and others. Among his books: L’opera racchiusa (2009, Lorenzo Montano Prize); Appunti dal passo del lupo (2013), in the book series curated by Eugenio De Signoribus; Mrogn (2017, Elio Pagliarani Prize); Requiem auf einer Stele (2017); Liner notes for a Pithecanthropus Erectus sketchbook (2018), with a foreword by SJ Fowler; the poetry/concrete catalogue, A private notebook of winds (2019). In 2017 he was awarded the Lorenzo Montano Prize for prose. In 2019 he was awarded the Nassau Review Writer Awards for poetry.
Website: http://federicofederici.net
Blog: http://leserpent.wordpress.com

Augusta Funk lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has work appearing in Best New Poets 2019, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.

April Goldman-Sims is a poet and pretty fun gal living in Truckee, CA. Recently, she’s been a member of both the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference. Say hi on instagram @aprileli. 

Stefania Gomez is a queer writer, audio maker, and teaching artist from Chicago’s South Side. She received her BA from Brown in 2017, and has work in The Offing, the Missouri Review, and Sinking City Review. She is the author of the chapbook ONCE I LOVED A COWBOY (Ghost City Press, 2019) and was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She works at the Poetry Foundation.

Krysten Hill is an educator, writer, and performer. She received her MFA in poetry from UMass Boston where she currently teaches. Her work can be found in apt, The Baltimore Review, B O D Y, The Boiler, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Word Riot, Muzzle, PANK, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award. Her chapbook, How Her Spirit Got Out, received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.

Clare Collins Hogan is a writer from Maryland. She received her MFA and a Zell Fellowship in poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared with Heavy Feather Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming from the EcoTheo Review and Fugue.

Mackenzie Kozak is a poet living in Asheville, NC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She was a 2018 finalist of the National Poetry Series. Find her online at mackenziekozak.com.

Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner.  She’s published three chapbooks, the latest, “In The Early Garden With Reason” was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her full manuscript “Small Measures” is forthcoming from  Twelve Winters Press. She’s also published short fiction and stories and poems for children. 

Lizzie Lawson is a Minnesota-born essayist with publications in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, and others. She is currently an MFA student in creative writing at The Ohio State University.

Kortney Morrow is an emerging writer and editor from Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has been featured in The O, Miami Poetry Festival and MACK by Raptor Editing. She is a Winter Tangerine Workshop alumna, and is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Ohio State University.

Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mainer/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems are forthcoming in New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Believer. Keith has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and Indiana University, where he earned an MFA. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Emily O’Neill writes and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican (2015), won YesYes Books’ inaugural Pamet River Prize for women and nonbinary writers, as well as the 2016 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Series in Poetry. Her second collection with YesYes, a falling knife has no handle (2018), was named one of the ten most anticipated poetry titles of fall by Publishers Weekly. She is the author of five chapbooks and her recent work appears in Bennington Review, Catapult, Little Fiction, and Redivider, among others. 

Thomas Renjilian is a queer writer originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from Oregon State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, DIAGRAM, Hobart, Thrush, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California, where he is a Dornsife Fellow.

Victoria Ritvo is a Psychology and Neuroscience PhD student at Princeton University, researching memory. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, TYPO, Bat City Review, and Berfrois. She spends her time in Princeton and New York City.

Born in Ireland, Laura O’Gorman Schwartz grew up in Tokyo, Singapore and New Jersey, before returning to live in Singapore in 2012. She graduated from Bard College with a B.A. in Japanese Studies. Currently a columnist for Living in Singapore magazine, her fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in: The Wall Street Journal, Wraparound South, The Shanghai Literary Review, Singapore American Newspaper, Thoughtful Dog and Ruminate Magazine.

Gianna Ward-Vetrano is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fiction has appeared in Scoundrel Time, THAT Literary Review, and Coffin Bell. She also has a blog, The Unbearable Bookishness of Blogging (www.unbearablebookishness.com), where she has written about literature, cinema, and feminism since 2013. She is the recipient of the Julia Keith Shrout Short Story Prize, awarded by the University of California, Berkeley.