Contributors

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of Only More So (Salmon). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, and CantoMundo.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent book, Hourglass Museum, was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. Her second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, was the winner of the Foreword Book of the Year Prize for poetry and was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. She is also the coauthor of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, which she coauthored with Martha Silano. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. She is an avid paddleboarder who lives in a sleepy seaside town in the Pacific Northwest. www.agodon.com/www.twosylviaspress.com

Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow; her most recent collection of poems, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, was selected as Agape Editions’ EDITORS’ CHOICE, and will be published in 2019. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog. Her work appears in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, among others; her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program and The Speakeasy Project. Find her at 7TrainLove.org.

Andrew Bertaina’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications including: The Best American Poetry 2018, The ThreePenny Review, Tin House Online, Redivider, The Forge, and Green Mountains Review. More of his work is available at www.andrewbertaina.com.

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry, and her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Review, Georgia Review, The Normal School, and Brevity.

Bess Cooley won the 2017 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Columbia Poetry Review, Atticus Review, Breakwater Review, and Forklift, Ohio, among other journals. Educated at Knox College and the MFA program at Purdue University, she lives in Knoxville and teaches at the University of Tennessee.

Born in Ghana, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. Dawes currently serves as the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dawes is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and numerous books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection of poems is City of Bones: A Testament (2017). His other books include Speak from Here to There (2016), a collection of poems co-written with Australian poet John Kinsella, and Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius (2007), which remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. Dawes is a founder and director of the African Poetry Book Fund and co-founder and director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes’s awards include an Emmy, a Webby, the Forward Prize for Poetry for his first book, Progeny of Air (1994), a Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2004, he received the Musgrave Silver Medal for contribution to the arts in Jamaica. In 2017, Dawes was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems have received awards from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets. She is the Consulting Poetry Editor for the Raleigh Review and her work appears in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.

Asa Drake is a public services librarian. Her writing is published or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Frontier Poetry, The Margins, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry from The New School and was a finalist for Omnidawn’s 2018 Chapbook Competition.

Stevie Edwards is the founder and editor-in-chief of Muzzle Magazine and senior editor in book development at YesYes Books. She is the author of poetry collections Good Grief (Write Bloody, 2012) and Humanly (Small Doggies, 2015), as well as poetry chapbook Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018). She holds an MFA from Cornell University and is a PhD student at University of North Texas. Her poems have been published in Crazyhorse, Gulfcoast, Pleaides, 32 Poems, West Branch, and elsewhere.

Nava EtShalom’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, and other journals, and her chapbook Fortunately is coming in 2019 from Button Poetry. Her work has won the 92Y Discovery Prize, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and two Academy of American Poets university prizes. She’s a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she writes about literary representations of settler-colonialism in Palestine.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of four chapbooks, including Twice Shy, forthcoming from Nomadic Press, and Harm’s Way, forthcoming from dancing girl press. Her poetry can be found in Third Coast, Granta, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of the queer literary journal Foglifter and lives in sunny Oakland, California.

Rome Lisa Hernández Morgan is a queer, Mexican-American writer from Texas. She received her B.A. in English and Spanish from the University of North Texas, and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, where she is a Walton Fellow. Rome is currently the nonfiction editor of Up North Lit. This is her first poetry publication.

Esteban Ismael teaches Writers Workshop & Literature courses through the San Diego Community College District. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Hawaii Review, Spillway, Poetry Daily, Dogwood, and The Massachusetts Review, among other fine journals.

Christofer Johnson is a PhD candidate concentrating in folklore. He is primarily interested in the political agency of folklore and folksong in the Anglophone world, the cultural dimensions of power in the contemporary period, and the way that cultural artifacts impact and shape the development of national identity. His dissertation work centers on the idea of cultural resilience and the self-conscious ways that communities (especially communities of work) adapt (or don’t), cope (or don’t) and change (or don’t) in the face of an increasingly globally integrated and connected world.

Maureen Langloss is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City. She serves as Flash Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her writing has appeared in CHEAP POP, Gulf Coast, Little Fiction, Sonora Review, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her online at maureenlangloss.com or on Twitter @maureenlangloss.

M.G. Leibowitz was born and raised in White Plains, NY. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, The Greensboro Review, and Mslexia. She is the recipient of CALYX Journal’s 2016 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2018 Geballe Prize for Writing, and the 2018 Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize. M.G. is an undergraduate at Stanford University.

Zach Linge is the current Assistant Editor and former Online Editor for The Southeast Review. His critical essays are forthcoming or published in African American Review and [Inter]sections Journal, and his poems are published in Sonora Review, Nimrod International Journal, and Permafrost Magazine, among other journals. Linge lives and teaches in Tallahassee.

Dave Lucas is the author of Weather (VQR/Georgia, 2011) which received the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. In 2018, he was appointed the second Poet Laureate of the State of Ohio. A co-founder of Cleveland Book Week and Brews + Prose at Market Garden Brewery, he lives in Cleveland, where he was born and raised.

Janice Majewski is a poet living in St. Louis. Her work is forthcoming in National Poetry Review and can be found in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Stockholm Review of Literature, Yes, Poetry, Entropy, Reality Beach, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and is the managing editor for Guesthouse.

Julia Paganelli Marín is the poetry editor for Up North Lit. In addition to her poetry chapbook, Blush Less (Finishing Line Press 2015), her writing is published or forthcoming in BOAAT Journal, Passages North, The Comstock Review, Hobart, The Madison Review, and more.

Gail Martin’s book Begin Empty-Handed won the Perugia Press Poetry prize in 2013 and was awarded the Housatonic Prize for Poetry in 2014. The Hourglass Heart (New Issues Prose and Poetry), was published in 2003. She works as a psychotherapist in private practice in Kalamazoo, MI. www.gailmartinpoetry.com.

Maria Martin is the 2nd Place winner of Narrative’s 2017 30 Below Contest. Her poems have appeared in jubilat, cream city review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. She manages the farmers market for the City of North Charleston and serves as Vice-President for the Poetry Society of South Carolina.

Matthew McDade (they/them) is an artist from elsewhere (the small town of East Palestine, Ohio) who conveys emotions to be felt everywhere, and by anyone. Growing up creating, McDade spent hours and hours finding their ethereal, personal creative presence among plenty of toasted-cheese sandwiches and endless packets of printer paper in a one-bedroom apartment with their single mother throughout the early-mid 2000s. And although they eventually stopped making art, McDade turned to it once again at the age of 19 in 2016. Since, they have persevered almost solely for the sake of proving one point to themselves: “I’m alive.”

Michelle Meier is the author of Famous Geranium (Nauset Press, 2015), a recipient of a fellowship at The Saltonstall Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her written work has appeared in The Rumpus, Radar Poetry, Pool Poetry, Dialogist, and elsewhere. She is the art editor and associate poetry editor of Foundry Journal. She lives in New York.

Jennifer Metsker’s poetry has been published in Beloit, Birdfeast, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Seattle Review, Rhino, wildness, and many other journals. Her audio poetry has been featured on the BBC Radio program Short Cuts. She also writes essays on art, and her most recent piece can be found in the anthology The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.

Lena Moses-Schmitt’s work appears in Best New Poets, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, Foundry, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She lives in California, where she works in publishing.

Rainie Oet is a nonbinary writer, Editor-in-Chief at Salt Hill, and the author of two books of poetry: Inside Ball Lightning (SEMO Press) and Glorious Veils of Diane (Carnegie Mellon University Press). They are an MFA candidate at Syracuse University, where they were awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Read more at rainieoet.com.

Carl Phillips is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), and Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015), winner of the PEN USA Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of two books of prose: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004), and he is the translator of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, his honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, and he’s the author of three chapbooks, two co-written with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2018 Thomas Morton Poetry Prize published by The Puritan, the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in the Poetry Society of America. Some poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Thrush, Guernica, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, Adroit, Redivider, and Passages North, among others. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Simon Shieh is a poet and the Director of InkBeat Arts, an organization that empowers young people through artistic expression. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Spittoon Literary Magazine, which translates and publishes the best new Chinese writers into English. Simon’s work appears in Grist, Public Poetry, Softblow, Kartika Review, CALAMITY, and Anomaly Literary Journal, among others.

Madeline Simms is a recent graduate of Knox College from La Grange, IL. In June of 2018, she attended the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. This is Madeline’s first publication outside of her alma mater’s Catch Magazine and Cellar Door. Currently, Madeline lives in Navan, Ireland where she is reading, writing, and working as an au pair.

J.J. Starr’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Drunken Boat, Juked, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and The Shallow Ends, among others. She studied at the N.Y.U. Creative Writing program in New York, where she was a Veterans Writer’s Workshop Fellow. She lives in Massachusetts.

Kelsi Vanada’s translation of The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet, was published in 2018 by Song Bridge Press. She holds MFAs in Poetry (Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and Literary Translation (The University of Iowa). She translates from Spanish and Swedish, and her poems and translations have been published most recently or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Bennington Review, Court Green, and Anomaly. She is the Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

Lauren Winchester was an Edward Albee fellow, and her work has appeared in Passages North, TYPO, BOAAT, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Jessica Yuan is a Kundiman fellow and Best of the Net nominee, and her poems are published or forthcoming in jubilat, Boulevard, Ninth Letter Online, American Chordata, Zone 3, and others. Jessica currently lives in Boston, where she is a graduate student studying architecture at Harvard.

Jihyun Yun is a Korean-American poet from California. A Fulbright Fellow, she received her BA in Psychology from UC Davis and her MFA from New York University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Ann Arbor where she is working on her first collection, Some are Always Hungry.

Sarah Antine received an MFA from Hunter College in 2004 and has shared work through various publications including, the anthology, Torah: A Women’s Commentary, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Lilith Magazine, Mom Egg Rewview: Vox Mom, Big City Lit, pms:poemmemoirstory, Elohi Gadugi, and upcoming in Moment Magazine. She lives in Potomac with her husband and three children.

Dan Beachy-Quick‘s Of Silence and Song, a collection of essays, fragments, and poems, will be published by Milkweed Editions in December 2017. His work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, and he teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University.

Brennan Bestwick is a reader and writer from the Flint Hills of Kansas. His poems have been published in THRUSH, Winter Tangerine, The Colorado Review, and Best New Poets. He is a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Project Award. He tweets @bestfriendwick.

Kristen Brida‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, New Delta Review, Hobart, Barrelhouse, Whiskey Island, and Bone Bouquet. She is the Editor in Chief of So to Speak, a feminist literary journal.

Scott Broker lives in Columbus, Ohio, where is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Ohio State University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are soon forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Sonora Review, among others. He can be found at scottjbroker.com.

J.H. Bond is from Boyd County, Kentucky, and now lives in Atlanta. For several years he covered MMA fighting for ESPN.com and other websites. His writing has been published in various magazines and newspapers in the U.S., Brazil, and Japan.

Joseph J. Capista‘s poems have appeared in AGNI, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, and The Georgia Review. His work has also been featured on Poetry Daily and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his family in Baltimore and teaches writing at Towson University.

Chelsea Dingman is a Canadian citizen and Visiting Instructor at the University of South Florida. Her first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). In 2016-17, she also won The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, and Water~Stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ninth Letter, The Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Cincinnati Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

Lane Falcon’s poems are forthcoming or have been recently published in American Poetry Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, December, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Gargoyle, RHINO, and more. She lives in Alexandria, VA with her two young children.

John Gallaher is the author of In a Landscape (BOA, 2014) and the forthcoming Brand New Spacesuit, also from BOA. He lives in rural Missouri and co-edits The Laurel Review.

Natalie Homer is an MFA candidate at West Virginia University. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Pinch, The Lascaux Review, Ruminate, Salamander, Blue Earth Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. She received an honorable mention for poetry in the 2017 AWP Intro Awards.

Luther Hughes is a Seattle native and author of Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of the Shade Journal and Associate Poetry Editor for The Offing. A Cave Canem fellow and Windy City Times Chicago: 30 Under 30 Honoree, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Vinyl, BOAAT, Tinderbox, The Adroit Journal, and others. Luther is currently an MFA candidate in the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Youcan follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

Bellee Jones-Pierce writes and mothers in a quiet corner of Alabama. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Emory University. Her research links disability and the lyric in early modern literature. A graduate of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, she also holds an MFA from Georgia College & State University.  

Jesse Lee Kercheval‘s latest poetry collection, America that island off the coast of France, won The Dorset Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She is also a translator; recent books include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren.

Katy Kim is a Korean American poet. Her work is forthcoming or published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Hobart, and has been featured on Verse Daily, among others.

Chip Livingston is the author of the novel Owls Don’t Have to Mean Death (Tincture, 2017); a collection of essays and short stories, Naming Ceremony (Lethe, 2014); and two collections of poetry, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (NYQBooks, 2012), and Museum of False Starts (Gival, 2010). His poetry, essays, and short stories have appeared in journals including Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and Mississippi Review, as well as on the Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets websites. Chip teaches in the low-residency MFA programs at Institute of American Indian Arts and Regis University.

Maja Lukic is a poet and environmental attorney. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Prelude, Salamander, Sugar House Review, Vinyl, Posit, Canary, and other journals. Selected pieces published online are available at majalukic.com, and she can be found on Twitter: @majalukic113. She lives in New York City.

Anna Mebel lives in Portland, OR, and has an MFA from Syracuse University. She is the author of the chapbook Eradicate Sex Chemicals! (dancing girl press) and a co-founding editor of Figure 1. Find her writing in Ghost Proposal, Pinwheel, Juked, and elsewhere.

When he died at the age of 83 in 2014, Malcolm Miller of Salem, Massachusetts left behind a trove of some 59 books of self-published poetry. A graduate of McGill University and a Navy veteran, Miller led an unconventional life, including stints of homelessness. He is the subject of the documentary Unburying Malcolm Miller (2017) by filmmakers Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse. More of Miller’s posthumous work is forthcoming in Paterson Literary Review.

Jenny Molberg’s debut collection of poetry, Marvels of the Invisible, won the 2014 Berkshire Prize (Tupelo Press, 2017). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, Boulevard, Redivider, Poetry International, The Orison Anthology, Best New Poets, and other publications. In 2017, she was the Mark Strand scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is Co-editor of Pleiades. Find her online at jennymolberg.com

Daniel Moysaenko holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the author of the chapbook New Animal (H_NGM_N Books, 2015). Other work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Oversound, Pleiades, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily, and The Volta. He is pursuing a poetry PhD at Florida State University.

Danny Thanh Nguyen’s short stories and personal essays have appeared in South Dakota Review, Entropy, Foglifter, New Delta Review, Gulf Coast, and other magazines. He received his MFA from Indiana University and is the editor of AS IS, an anthology of Vietnamese American art and literature. He is a Kundiman Fellow and a Lambda Literary Fellow. Find him @engrishlessons.

Amy Pickworth’s poems have appeared in Dusie; Forklift, Ohio; New Ohio Review; Smartish Pace; Two Serious Ladies; and other journals. Her book Bigfoot for Women (Orange Monkey Publishing, intro by Matt Hart) was released in 2014.

Meghann Plunkett is a poet, coder, and lover of dogs. She is the 2017 winner of the Third Coast Poetry Prize judged by Natalie Diaz. She was a finalist for the 2017 North American Review’s Hearst Poetry Prize as well as the 2016 Narrative Magazine‘s 30 Below Contest. Meghann has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets in both 2016 and 2017.  Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Rattle, The North American Review, Washington Square Review, Adroit Journal, The Paris-American, Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, decomP Magazine, storySouth, among others. Her essays, erasures, and animated poems can be found in Luna Luna Magazine. She is the writer in residence at Omega Institution and the director of The Black Dog Tall Ship Writing Retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, MA. Visit her at meghannplunkett.com.

Arabella Proffer is a painter whose loose narrative themes revolve around a fascination with punk rock, the dying aristocracy, the history of medicine, and biomorphic organisms. She attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA before receiving her BFA from California Institute of the Arts, where she studied under artists such as John Mandel, Derek Boshier, Jim Shaw, and Susan Pitt. Arabella participates in solo and group exhibitions throughout North America as well as parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Plain Dealer, Snob, Hi-Fructose, Juxtapoz, The Harvard Gazette, Scene Magazine, Hektoen International Medical Journal, and more. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and bred in Southern California, she lives on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio.

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT, and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss. His first book, Refuse, is the winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry prize and will be published by University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2018.

Caitlin Roach received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Provost Fellow and the recipient of a Postgraduate Fellowship. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2017, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, West Branch, Copper Nickel, Prelude, Handsome, and The Iowa Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she is an assistant professor-in-residence. More of her work can be found at caitlinroach.com.

Eileen Rush is a writer from Johnson City, Tennessee. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. She lives in the swamp and practices hortitorture by drinking beer on her porch while pruning misshapen topiaries. Her work appears in Stoneboat, FOLIO, Word Riot, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Sam Rush began writing poems after developing progressive hearing loss and realizing how many words each word could be. They were a finalist at the National Poetry Slam in 2016. Their work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Offing, Muzzle, and Drunk in a Midnight Choir.

Leslie Sainz is a first-generation Cuban-American, born and raised in Miami, Florida. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she served as the Editor-in-Chief of Devil’s Lake. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, POOL, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. She is the Fall 2017 Writer-in-Residence at the Hub City Writers Project.

Hannah Shea is an MFA student in poetry at Johns Hopkins. She is an assistant editor for The Hopkins Review and co-founder of Row Home Press.

Lily Starr is an eager student of poetry from North East, Maryland. She graduated from Washington College in the spring of 2017 and is currently pursuing an MFA from Florida International University in Miami.

Jaz Sufi is a Kundiman fellow, a National Poetry Slam finalist, and the slammaster of the Berkeley Slam, the longest running poetry event on the West Coast. She was a a featured poet at the 2011 USF Creative Justice Art Show and has featured at venues across the country, from the Scottish Rites Center to performing alongside the Townsend Opera. Her work has been published or is upcoming in PANK, DIALOGIST, The Offing, The Dead Animal Handbook, and elsewhere.

John Allen Taylor’s first chapbook, Unmonstrous, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in spring 2019. His poems are published in Booth, RHINO, NashvilleReview, Zone 3, Muzzle, and other places. He serves as Ploughshares’s senior poetry reader, and he coordinates the writing center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Say hello @johna_taylor.

Mary Jo Thompson is the author of Stunt Heart (Backwaters Press, 2017), selected by Henri Cole for the 2016 Backwaters Poetry Prize. Her poetry is anthologized in The Best American Poetry, 2011 and Another and Another, Bull City Press, and has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Rhino, Indiana Review, Spillway, and Carolina Quarterly, among other journals. Thompson holds a MFA in Creative Writing from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and teaches teachers and arts managers at two universities in Minneapolis. She lives on an island in the Mississippi River.  

H.R. Webster is a 2017-2018 poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, The Seattle Review, Ecotone, and other journals.  

Shana Youngdahl is the author of History, Advice and Other Half Truths as well as three chapbooks, most recently Winter/Windows (Miel 2012). Individual poems have appeared lately  in 1110, Rhino: A Poetry Journal, and Muse/A. She teaches writing at the University of Maine, Farmington where she also oversees The Sandy River Review online and directs the Longfellow Young Writers’ Workshop.

Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping, a 2014 winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize selected by Fanny Howe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gathering of Tribes, Plume, Poet Lore, and the recent anthology Resisting Arrest. Ali has been honored with two Literature fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He currently teaches high school English at a private school in Baltimore. 

Rennie Ament studied poetry at Hunter College, where she has taught creative writing.  Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Prelude, and elsewhere.   She lives in Astoria, Queens and works at Poets House in Manhattan.  

Rae Armantrout is professor emerita of writing at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of thirteen previous books of poetry, most recently Partly.

Paul Asta was born in South Korea. He is a bookbinder and writer from the Chicago suburbs. He is a poetry editor for Hobart, and currently resides in Cork, Ireland, studying creative writing at University College Cork on a Fulbright Scholarship. He is a founding member of Frontier Slumber, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Indiana University, Bloomington where he earned his MFA in Poetry.

Monica Berlin’s first book, No Shape Bends the River So Long, a collaborative collection of poems with Beth Marzoni, was published in 2015 (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press). Her solo work has appeared in many journals, most recently The Cincinnati Review, Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, Passages North, Kudzu House Quarterly, Bennington Review, december, Salt Hill, Water~Stone Review and The Kenyon Review. Berlin serves as Associate Director of the Program in Creative Writing and Chair of the English Department at Knox College in Galesburg, IL, where she is an associate professor.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry chapbook Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Tiana is currently an MFA candidate and teaching assistant at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Poetry Editor for Nashville Review. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Rattle, Best New Poets 2015, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. Tiana received the Tennessee Williams scholarship to The Sewanee Writers’ Conference. You can find her online at tianaclark.com.

Grant Clauser is the author of the books Necessary Myths (2013) and The Trouble with Rivers (2012). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review,  Painted Bride Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review and others. By day he writes about electronics, and sometimes he fishes. He blogs occasionally at www.unIambic.com.  Twitter: @uniambic

Brian Clifton co-edits Bear Review. His work can be found in: Pleiades, Guernica, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, and other such magazines.

S. Brook Corfman is a poet who writes plays, living in a turret in Pittsburgh. A Lambda Literary Fellow who has also been published as Sam Corfman, work has appeared or will appear soon in Phantom, Prelude, Ghost Proposal, Washington Square Review, and OmniVerse, among other places.

Adam Day is the author of A Model of City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and is the recipient of a PSA Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Emerging Writers Award. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He directs The Baltic Writing Residency in Sweden, Scotland, and Blackacre Nature Preserve. These poems form part of a triptych of poems that function as mock centos, working as a parody of explicit, problematic sexual writing by novelists such as Roth, Franzen, Mailer, Updike and others.

Jessica Farquhar holds an MFA in Poetry from Purdue, where she was the assistant director of Creative Writing. You can find her poems in recent or forthcoming issues of Diagram, Fogged Clarity, and Interrupture

Jennifer Franklin is the author of Looming (2015), winner of the 14th Annual Editor’s Prize from Elixir Press. She received an AB from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Harvey Baker Fellow. She was nominated for the 2016 Rona Jaffe Award. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary magazines and journals including Blackbird, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Nation, New England Review, [PANK], “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, and Southwest Review. She teaches poetry workshops at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, where she serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City.

Matthew Gellman’s poems are featured or forthcoming in Thrush, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle, Word Riot, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and a scholarship from the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Michael Homolka is the author of Antiquity, winner the 2015 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. His poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Agni, and Poetry Daily. A graduate of Bennington College’s MFA program, he currently teaches high school students in New York City. 

Hanae Jonas is a Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in jubilat, The Volta, Columbia Journal, H_NGM_N, and Twelfth House.

Abe Koogler writes plays and fiction. His plays have been produced or are upcoming at Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Goodman Theatre, and are published by Dramatists Play Service and Bloomsbury. He earned an MFA from the Michener Center at UT-Austin, and is a native of Washington State.

Dan Kraines is a poet whose work has most recently appeared in the anthology The Traveler’s Vade Mecum. He teaches at the University of Rochester, where he is a PhD student and Slattery Fellow. Like many other writers, he cherished corresponding with Franz Wright.

Kara Krewer grew up on an orchard in rural Georgia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Purdue University, where she also taught creative writing and film studies. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Prodigal, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2016-2018 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Yael Massen is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Indiana University and former Nonfiction Editor and Associate Poetry Editor of Indiana Review. Her poems can be found within the pages and URLs of DIAGRAM, Hobart, Mid-American Review, Lilith, Southern Indiana Review, Ninth Letter Online, and Day One. She is a recipient of the 2016 Vera Meyer Strube Academy of American Poets Award, the 2016 Kraft-Kinsey Award from the Kinsey Institute, and was a 2015 TENT Fellow in Creative Writing at the Yiddish Book Center. She volunteers as an On-Scene Advocate and a Legal Advocate at Middle Way House, a domestic violence shelter in Bloomington, Indiana, where she lives, works, and walks.

Sarah Munroe is a creative writing MFA candidate in poetry at West Virginia University, where she is also the editorial assistant for the West Virginia University Press and the poetry editor for Cheat River Review. She has a deep and abiding love for dinosaurs. When not in Morgantown, she can be found in Philadelphia with her husband and their two dogs.

Miguel Murphy is the author of Detainee and A Book Called Rats, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. He lives in Southern California where he teaches as Santa Monica College. 

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of the lyric essay collection, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, which won the Non/Fiction Prize from OSU Press. Her poetry collections are The End of Pink (BOA, 2016) and Rag & Bone (Elixir, 2011). Recent work appears in 32 Poems, Crazyhorse, Field, Ninth Letter, Poetry International,  and Willow Springs. She is an associate professor of Creative Writing at University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

Ines Pujos holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and lives in NYC. She is the cofounder of Print Oriented Bastards, an online literary journal. Her poems will be appearing Salt Hill Press and has been previously published in Cosmonauts Ave, Powder Keg, The Adroit Journal, Day One, Bone Bouquet, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Phantom, Hayden’s Ferry, Puerto del Sol, and Verse Daily, among others.

John Repp‘s poems have appeared in several past issues of The Journal. His most recent collection is Fat Jersey Blues, winner of the 2013 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press.

C. F. Sibley is the Assistant Editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review. She received a scholarship to Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in 2012 and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from DIAGRAM, Sugar House, FIELD, Muzzle Magazine, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015.  

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008) and most recently Vanitas, Rough (Persea, December 2012).  A new collection of her poems, Orexia, will appear from Persea in 2017.  She is the editor of Acquainted with the Night:  Insomnia Poems (Columbia University Press, 1999) and All that Mighty Heart:  London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008), and a collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse:  Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, appeared from Drunken Boat Media in March 2013.  She is the editor of a new anthology, Monticello in Mind:  Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson, due out from the University of Virginia Press in February 2016.  Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, a 2016 Pushcart Prize Anthology award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or forthcoming in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthology series and have recently appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, IMAGE, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is a poet, educator, collaborative artist, and licensed builder. Her poetry has appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West and elsewhere. A chapbook, Forking The Swift, was published in 2010. She has received grants from the Sewanee Writers Conference, The Vermont Studio Center, Warren Wilson College where she received her MFA in poetry, and The Bear River Writers Conference.  In 2016 she was the Writers@Work Poetry Fellow selected by Tarfia Faizzulah and won the The Connecticut River Review Poetry Prize. She lives in Traverse City, Michigan and teaches at The Leelanau School and at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Nomi Stone is the author of the poetry collection STRANGER’S NOTEBOOK (TriQuarterly, 2008), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2016, Diode, Poetry Northwest, Guernica, and elsewhere, and her new manuscript KILL CLASS was just named runner-up for the May Sarton Poetry prize.

Jason Tandon is the author of three collections of poetry including, Quality of Life (Black Lawrence Press, 2013) and Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt (Black Lawrence Press, 2009), winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Esquire, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry East, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Leah Umansky is the author of the dystopian themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016)¸ the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014) and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox, 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Poetry, Boston Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Golden Shovel Anthology, and elsewhere. You can find her at www.leahumansky.com.

Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published creative work in over 600 journals. Williamson has published poetry in over 200 journals, including The Oklahoma Review, The Roanoke Review, Pamplemousse, formerly known as The Gihon River Review, The Copperfield Review, The Penwood Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Some of his visual artwork has appeared in journals such as Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The William & Mary Review, New England Review, The Tulane Review and The Wisconsin Review. Williamson is an Assistant Professor of English at Allen University. Learn more here: www.ernestwilliamsoniii.com