Contributors
Jessica Guzman Alderman’s work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Ecotone, Tin House’s Broadside Thirty series, the Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She received American Literary Review’s 2017 poetry award and Harpur Palate’s 2017 Milton Kessler Memorial Poetry Prize. A doctoral student at the University of Southern Mississippi, she reads for Memorious and Split Lip Magazine.
Clover Archer is the director of Staniar Gallery at Washington and Lee University where she also teaches in the art department. Her mixed-media conceptual art practice is dedicated to the creative interpretation of granular history. In 2011, she was the recipient of a Professional Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and has twice been a residency fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
Sara Batkie is the author of the story collection Better Times, which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Prize and is published by University of Nebraska Press. She received her MFA from New York University. Stories of hers have been honored with a 2017 Pushcart Prize and a notable mention in the 2011 edition of The Best American Short Stories. She was born in Bellevue, Washington and grew up mostly in Iowa, but currently makes her home in Brooklyn.
Curtis Bauer is a poet (most recently The Real Cause for Your Absence from C&R Press) and a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish: most recently Image of Absence by Jeannette Clariond from Word Works Press, Eros Is More by Juan Antonio González Iglesias from Alice James Books, and From Behind What Landscape by Luis Muñoz from Vaso Roto Editions. He directs the creative writing program at Texas Tech University and is the translations editor for the Common.
T.S. Bender is a writer and teacher who grew up outside of Philadelphia and now lives in Maryland with his wife and beagle. He is currently working on a novel, which includes “Bellarosa.”
Lisa Rose Bradford—poet, translator, musician, and rancher—teaches comparative literature at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina. Recipient of the National Translation Award, she recently published her fifth bilingual collection of Juan Gelman’s poetry, Today/Hoy with Co.im.press. As coeditor of Voz feroz/Ferocious Voice, an anthology of Argentine and Uruguayan women poets, she is at present translating works by Liliana Lukin, Juana Bignozzi, and Mirta Rosenberg.
Selva Casal is the award-winning author of fifteen books of poetry. A former lawyer, Casal is inspired by her experiences working with people who have faced injustice. Her 1975 publication of No vivimos en vano [We do not live in vain] during the military dictatorship in Uruguay resulted in her losing her position as a professor of sociology. She resides in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems, OBIT, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her previous, Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney’s) won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches within Antioch’s MFA Program.
John Lee Clark is the author of the essay collection Where I Stand (Handtype Press, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, the Nation, Poetry, Poetry International, and Rattle. He lives in Hopkins, Minnesota, with the artist and author Adrean Clark and their three sons.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. She is currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third poetry collection, and Purchase, a collection of essays. She is an associate professor of English at Cornell University.
Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. In 2016 his book, Speak from Here to There, a co-written collection of verse with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared. His most recent collection is City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern University Press, 2017). He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and teaches at the University of Nebraska and the Pacific MFA Program. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Shamala Gallagher’s poetry collection, Late Morning When the World Burns, is forthcoming from The Cultural Society. She is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, and her work appears in Poetry, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Originally from San Jose, she has worked and volunteered for a decade in homeless services all over the country. She’s now a PhD candidate in Athens, Georgia.
Chelsea Harlan is the author of Bright Shade, selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She lives in rural Appalachian Virginia, where she was born and raised, and where she works at a small public library.
Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, bookmaker, public-letter writer, urban cyclist, and cofounder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena and the local language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. She publishes poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, belladonna, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, LRL Textile Editions, NewLights Press, Palm Press, Subpress, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations.
John Keene’s recent books include the story collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015) and several books of poetry. He also has translated the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014). His recent honors include an American Book Award and Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, as well as a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He chairs the department of African American and African Studies and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark.
Patrick Kindig is a PhD candidate in Indiana University’s Department of English. He is the author of the micro-chapbook Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press, 2016) and the chapbook all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming), and his poems appear in the Journal, Meridian, Third Coast, Columbia Poetry Review, and other journals.
Naira Kuzmich was born in Armenia and raised in the Los Angeles enclave of Little Armenia. Her nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, the Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, the Massachusetts Review, Guernica, and the Southern Review, among others. Her fiction can be found in West Branch, Blackbird, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, and elsewhere. Naira passed away from lung cancer in 2017, at the age of twenty-nine.
Matthew Lansburgh’s collection of linked stories, Outside Is the Ocean, won the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award and the 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. The book's title story was named a Distinguished Story in The Best American Short Stories 2018, and the collection has received praise from Andre Dubus III (“mesmerizing”), Kirkus (“arresting and pointed”), Booklist (“captivating”), and Margot Livesey (“a brilliant collection”). Matthew's fiction appears or is forthcoming in One Story, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Electric Literature, StoryQuarterly, Columbia, Guernica, the Florida Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems appear in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Program, Verse Daily, and Copper Nickel. Keith has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Indiana University, where he earned an MFA. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Virginia Lucas was born in Uruguay in 1977 and is a poet and editor. Among other books, she has published: Épicas Marinas (Artefato, 2004), No es de acanto la flor en piedra (Lapsus, 2005), Muestra de cuentos lesbianos (Trilce, 2010), and Orsai: género, erotismo y subjetividad (Pirates, Mvd., 2008). Jen Hofer’s translation of her book Amé.RICA (tu valor de cambio) will be published by Litmus Press in 2019. English-language versions of her poems have been published in Aufgabe, Drunken Boat, Harriet, Jai-Alai, NACLA Report on the Americas, the Offending Adam, Tripwire, and Tupelo Quarterly.
Liliana Lukin was born in Buenos Aires in 1951 and is a poet and educator who has been quite active in literary and cultural activities in Buenos Aires, having been a consultant for the General San Martín Cultural Center, for the Noble Foundation for their writers’ series, and having founded the Centroimargen interdisciplinary cultural space. Known for her penchant for philosophical topics and her reflections on words, politics, and history with a tension between what is individual and what is collective, she has published a great number of poetry collections including Abracadabra, 1978; Malasartes, 1981; Descomposición, 1986; Cortar por lo Sano, Carne de Tesoro, 1990; Cartas, 1992; Las preguntas, 1998; retórica erótica, 2002; Construcción comparativa, 2003; Teatro de Operaciones. Anatomía y Literatura, 2007; El Libro Del Buen Amor, 2015. Her books have been translated into German and French and her verse has been included in various international anthologies and magazines.
Mita Mahato is a cut paper, collage, and comix artist and educator whose work focuses on lost and disappearing animals and objects. Her collected book of poetry comix, In Between (Pleiades), is listed in The Best American Comics: The Notable Comics of 2019. Other works are featured in Coast/No Coast, ANMLY, AModern, Illustrated PEN, and Drunken Boat, and her current book-in-progress is supported by a CityArtist Project Grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
Amit Majmudar is a novelist, poet, translator, essayist, and diagnostic nuclear radiologist. Majmudar's latest book is Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf, 2018). Two novels, Sitayana and Soar, are forthcoming in India from Penguin Random House India in 2019, as well as a poetry collection in the United States, Kill List (Knopf, 2020). His prose has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 and The Best American Essays 2018. He writes and practices in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, twin sons, and daughter.
Janet McAdams is the author of the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After (Kent State, 2016), the novel Red Weather (Arizona, 2012), and two collections of poetry, Feral (Salt, 2007) and The Island of Lost Luggage (Arizona, 2000), which won the American Book Award. She teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry and an editor at large for the Kenyon Review.
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Forage, forthcoming, both from Penguin Books, and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. She is associate professor of creative writing at Auburn University and coeditor in chief and poetry editor of the Southern Humanities Review.
Brandon Melendez is a Mexican-American poet from California. He is the author of Gold That Frames The Mirror (Write Bloody, 2019), a National Poetry Slam finalist, and best poem winner at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI). A recipient of the the 2018 Djanikian Scholarship from the Adroit Journal and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Award, his poems can be found in Black Warrior Review, the Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Ninth Letter, PANK, and elsewhere.
Fabio Morábito was born in Alexandria Egypt in 1955 to Italian parents. He moved to Milan when he was five, and when he was fifteen he moved to Mexico City, where he currently lives and works in the Autonomous University of Mexico. Morábito is the author of four books of poetry including De lunes todo el año [Monday All Year Long], which won the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize, and Delante de un prado una vaca [In Front of a Pasture, a Cow], two novels including Caja de herramientas [Tool Box] (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), which was translated into English by Geoff Hargreaves and published by Xenox Books in 1996, five books of short stories including La vida ordenada [An Ordered Life] (Tusquets, 2000) and Grieta de fatiga [Rift of Fatigue] (Tusquets, 2012), and three books of essays including El idioma materno [Mother Tongue] (Sexto Piso, 2014). Morábito is also a prolific translator, and he has translated the complete works of Eugenio Montale and Aminto de Torquato Tasso, among many other Italian poets and prose writers. In addition to Geoff Hargreaves’s English translation of the book Tool Box, his writing has been translated into German, French, Portuguese and Italian.
Lucas M. Morel graduated from Washington and Lee in 2018 and currently studies in the University of Virginia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, pursuing his Master’s degree in English. He is primarily interested in African American literature: particularly the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Kendrick Lamar.
Alicia Mountain is the author of the collection High Ground Coward (University of Iowa Press), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Thin Fire (BOAAT Press). She is a lesbian poet, critic, and educator based in Denver and New York. Keep up with her @HiGroundCoward.
Hai-Dang Phan was born in Vietnam and raised in Wisconsin. His first book of poems, Reenactments, will be published this February with Sarabande.
Jeannine M. Pitas is a writer, teacher, and Spanish-English translator living in Iowa, where she teaches at the University of Dubuque. Her translation of four books by Marosa di Giorgio, published as I Remember Nightfall by Ugly Duckling Presse, was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award. Her most recent poetry chapbook, Thank You For Dreaming, was published by Lummox Press in 2018.
Kate Osana Simonian is an Armenian-Australian hailing from Sydney. A PhD candidate at Texas Tech, she is completing her debut novel, Australialand. Her work has been published by Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Tribune, and Best Australian Stories. Recent honors include the Nelson Algren Award. Find her on Twitter @kate_o_simonian.
Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry: The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo, 2010), Wintering (Tupelo, 2016), and The Gunnywolf (Bear Star, 2016). She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from Bread Loaf, Djerassi, the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, and the 4Culture Foundation. Her work has also appears in Ecotone, the Antioch Review, The Hopper, the Southern Review, the Sewanee Review, Field, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.
Shruti Swamy’s fiction has been included in the 2016 and 2017 editions of The O. Henry Prize Stories, and appears in the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Earthly Pleasures, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. She lives in San Francisco.
Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Nashville Review, the Southeast Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, the American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Dujie has earned fellowships from the Richard Hugo House and Jack Straw Writing Program. He serves as a poetry editor for Moss and Homology Lit and cohosts the Poet Salon podcast. He got his start as a Seattle Poetry Slam Finalist, a collegiate grand slam champion, and Seattle Youth Speaks Grand Slam Champion, representing Seattle at HBO’s Brave New Voices.
Tillie Walden is a cartoonist and illustrator from Austin, Texas, and is the creator of many award-winning graphic novels, including the Eisner-winning graphic memoir Spinning. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Lilly Wimberly graduated with a degree in English and politics from Washington and Lee University in May. Following graduation, she briefly relocated to NYC to attend Columbia University’s publishing institute, and has since settled in DC after accepting a job at Axios Media under fellow W&L grad Mike Allen. When she isn’t stalking politicians like celebrities, Lilly can frequently be found dragging her friends to foodie spots and writing unsolicited Yelp reviews.
Kathleen Winter is the author of I will not kick my friends (2018), winner of the Elixir Poetry Prize, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, which won the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, New Statesman, Agni, New Republic, Cincinnati Review, and Yale Review. She was granted fellowships at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Dobie Paisano Ranch, Dora Maar House, James Merrill House, and Cill Rialaig.
A first generation Chinese-Canadian, Isaac Yuen’s short stories and personal essays appear in Flyway, Hippocampus, Orion, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things,” Tahoma Literary Review, Tin House Online, and other publications. He is the creator of Ekostories, an online essay collection exploring narratives through themes of nature, culture, and identity. Isaac lives in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory.