Contributors

Grace Arenas is a poet who received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2017. Her chapbook, they’ll outlive you all, was published in late 2017 with Dancing Girl Press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Malarkey Books, Theta Wave, and others. She currently lives and teaches in Boston.

Emma Aylor is a poet whose work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Sixth Finch, Barrow Street, Yemassee, and Salt Hill, among other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. Raised in Bedford County, Virginia, she currently lives in Seattle.

René Bascopé Aspiazu was born in La Paz, Bolivia in 1951 and died in 1984 at age thirty-three from an accidental gunshot wound. He was a novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and was the founder and co-director of the magazine Trasluz. He later lived in exile in Mexico, during which time he worked for the Fondo De Cultura Económica and for the El Día newspaper. He was the coeditor of an anthology of short stories, Seis Nuevos Narradores Bolivianos, published in 1979, and from 1980 to 1984 served as the director of the weekly publication Aquí De La Paz. He is the author of the following books: the short story collections Ángela Desde Su Propia Oscuridad (1977), Primer Fragmento De Noche y Otros Cuentos (1977), Niebla y Retorno (1979)—both volumes awarded the Premio Franz Tamayo—La Noche De Los Turcos (1983), Cuentos Completos y Otros Relatos (2004); the essay collection La Veta Blanca: Coca y Cocaina En Bolivia (1982); the novels La Tumba Infecunda (1985)—posthumously awarded the Premio Erich Guttentag—Los Rostros De La Oscuridad (1988); and the poetry collection Las Cuatro Estaciones (2007).

John Bengan is a writer who teaches at the Department of Humanities in the University of the Philippines Mindanao. His work appears in Likhaan 6, Kritika Kultura, BooksActually’s Gold Standard, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, among others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. His literary translations appear or are forthcoming in Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and LIT.

Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet. She is a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in poetry and earned her MFA from Virginia Tech. She has received awards from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work appears in The Sun, Pleiades, Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Slice, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere.

Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Swallows and Waves. She has been a recipient of the Amy Lowell Scholarship for Poets Traveling Abroad and an NEA Fellowship. She is the 2020 John Montague International Poetry Fellow in Ireland.

Jaswinder Bolina is author of the poetry collections The 44th of July, Phantom Camera, and Carrier Wave, and of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America. His poems and essays have appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad and have been collected in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry and The Norton Reader. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.

Wendy Call translated In the Belly of Night and Other Poems by Irma Pineda (Pluralia, 2020); wrote No Word for Welcome (Nebraska, 2011), winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction; and coedited Telling True Stories (Penguin, 2007). She was a 2018-2019 Fulbright scholar in Colombia, teaches creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University, and makes her home in Seattle. These translations were supported by a 2015 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books, and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications, his poetry appears in the American Journal of Poetry, Cortland Review, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, and Tar River Poetry. Robert is poetry editor with Indolent Books and Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

May-lee Chai is the author of two recent short story collections, Tomorrow in Shanghai, which debuted of August 2022, and the American Book Award-winning collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants, eight additional books of fiction and nonfiction, and the translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. She is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship in Prose, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and an Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Outstanding Book Awards.

Marisa P. Clark is a queer Southerner whose writing appears in Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Potomac Review, Rust + Moth, and others, with work forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Ponder Review, and elsewhere. She was twice the winner of the Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Prizes (in fiction, 1996; in nonfiction, 1997). The Best American Essays 2011 recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. She reads fiction for New England Review and makes her home in New Mexico with three parrots and two dogs.

Brian Clifton is the author of the chapbooks MOT (Osmanthus Press, 2019) and Agape (Osmanthus Press, 2019). 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.

Dorsey Craft’s debut collection, Plunder (Bauhan 2020), won the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She is also the author of a chapbook, The Pirate Anne Bonny Dances the Tarantella (CutBank 2020). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, the Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD candidate in poetry at FSU and a poetry editor at Southeast Review.

Zoë Dutka was born in New York and moved to Venezuela in her teens. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New England Review, n+1, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She now lives in Brazil.

Allison Field Bell is originally from California, but has spent the better part of the past decade living and writing in the Southwest. She holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Witness Magazine, West Branch, The Pinch, the Florida Review, Fugue, New Madrid, the Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.

Ida Floreak is a New Orleans-based artist originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design where she studied painting and scientific illustration. Ida’s work is influenced by her studies in Rome with RISD’s European Honors Program and her work as an archaeological illustrator on the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project in Vescovado di Murlo. Raised outside of organized religion, Ida turned to science and the natural world to answer questions about our origins and purpose, finding meaning and beauty in the mathematical structure and symmetry of natural objects. Pulling from her personal collection, she paints bones, gems, leaves and insects in formations reminiscent of the Italian grotteschi and devotional art. Painting in an over-large scale, Ida attempts to give these small and humble objects a treatment otherwise reserved for saints or deities.

Ellen Goldstein was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the author of Stuff Every Beer Snob Should Know, which was published by Quirk Books in 2018. Her writing appears in journals such as Post Road, the Common, Tahoma Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. Her work also appears in the anthologies Spectral Lines, Not Quite What I Was Planning, Letters to the World, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and Queer South, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

Rodney Gomez is the author of Citizens of the Mausoleum and Ceremony of Sand. His collections Arsenal with Praise Song and Geographic Tongue, winner of the Pleiades Press’s Visual Poetry Series, are forthcoming. His work appears in Poetry, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, the Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, and other journals. He is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and serves as the 2020–2021 Poet Laureate of McAllen, Texas.

Corrado Govoni was born in 1884 in Tamara, Italy. He is considered the father of the literary movement of Crepuscularism, literally meaning “Twilight,” and concerning itself with humble subjects, melancholy, and introspection. He also wrote novels, stories, and plays. He died near Rome in 1965.

Marlon Hacla is a programmer, writer, and photographer. His first book, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. He also released two chapbooks, Labing-anim na Liham ng Kataksilan (2014) and Melismas (2016). In 2017, he created Estela Vadal, the first robot poet in Filipino.

Tim Hunt is an occupational therapist in Chicago, Illinois. “You Alone” is his first published story.

Luisa A. Igloria is one of two co-winners of the 2019 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry open competition for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, fall 2020). In 2015 she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Poetry Prize, the world’s first major award for ecopoetry. Other works include The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis, Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser–winner of the 2014 May Swenson Poetry Award–and twelve other books. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.

Former city worker Max King Cap is a writer whose work appears in the The Racial Imaginary, Tahoma Literary Review, the Threepenny Review, Ponder Review, and Artillery Magazine; as a visual artist he has had numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States. He earned his MFA from the University of Chicago, his doctorate from the University of Southern California, and has taught at Columbia College Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Pitzer College. He lives in Los Angeles.

Lauren Krouse is a creative nonfiction writer and health journalist based in the Shenandoah Valley. She’s a graduate of the College of Charleston and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work appears in the News & Observer, Prevention, Wilmington Magazine, The Journal, Ravishly, Paper Darts, and others.

Quinn Lewis’s poems appear, or will soon, in the Southern Review, Cave Wall, Birmingham Poetry Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Claudia Emerson Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and RADAR Poetry’s 2019 Coniston Prize. She teaches in the English Department at SUNY Oneonta.

You Li is a lawyer and poet who was born in Beijing and lives in New York. Her poems appear in Lunch Ticket, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s the Margins, The BOILER, Poetry South, and elsewhere. She has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Miriam Libicki’s comics appear in the Nib, GEIST Magazine, the Journal of Jewish Identities, and Rutgers University Press. Her memoir jobnik! has been used in more than twenty university courses. Her book of drawn essays received the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature. Libicki received a BFA in visual art from Emily Carr University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She was the 2017 Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence.

Bill Manhire was New Zealand’s inaugural poet laureate, and is also the founder of a well-known creative writing program at Victoria University of Wellington. He has published several volumes of poetry, including a Selected Poems with both Carcanet in the UK and Victoria University Press in New Zealand. A new collection, Wow, will be published later this year.

Juan Martinez is the author of Best Worst American, a story collection published by Small Beer Press, and the inaugural winner of the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction. He lives in Chicago and is an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work appears in many literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Huizache, Ecotone, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere.

Harry Morales is a Spanish literary translator, whose translations include the work of the late Mario Benedetti, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Eugenio María de Hostos, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Juan Rulfo, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Ilan Stavans, and Francisco Proaño Arandi, among many other distinguished Latin American writers. His work has been widely published in numerous anthologies and appears in various journals, including Pequod, Quarterly West, Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, the Literary Review, Agni, the Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Mānoa, BOMB, WorldView, Puerto del Sol, the Iowa Review, Michigan Review, World Literature Today, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Denver Quarterly, among others. He is the translator of two poetry collections by Mario Benedetti, Only in the Meantime & Office Poems (Austin, Texas: Host Publications, June 2006), and a volume of stories, The Rest is Jungle and Other Stories (Austin, Texas: Host Publications, September 2010). His new English translation of Benedetti’s internationally acclaimed, award-winning novel, La Tregua (The Truce: The Diary of Martín Santomé) was published by Penguin UK Modern Classics in September 2015.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s newest book is a collection of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions, August 2020). She is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Her writing appears in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. She was recently named a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015). Widely anthologized, her short stories appear in Conjunctions, Tin House, and World Literature Today.

Molly Patterson is the author of the novel Rebellion (Harper) published in 2017. Her short stories appear in several magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and the Iowa Review, and in the 2014 edition of The Pushcart Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire, where she lives with her husband and three children.

Brenda Peynado’s short story collection, The Rock Eaters, is forthcoming from Penguin Press in early 2021. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Literary Award, inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, and other awards. Her work appears in the Georgia Review, the Sun, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, the Threepenny Review, Tor.com, and other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She’s currently writing a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who can tell all possible futures. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

Irma Pineda (Binnizá/Isthmus Zapotec) has published nine books of bilingual (Spanish-Isthmus Zapotec) poetry. Naxiña’ Rului’ladxe’ – Rojo Deseo (Red Desire, by Pluralia) won Mexico’s Caballo Verde 2018 best poetry book prize. The poems published here are from her 2007 collection, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La Nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos (Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater). She works for Mexico’s National Teachers’ University as well as the Mexican Federal Congress. She serves as a vice president of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and lives in Mexico City and Juchitán, Oaxaca.

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.

stephanie roberts is the author of the poetry collection rushes from the river disappointment (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). A widely published Quebec-based poet, she has work featured in Poetry Magazine, the League of Canadian Poets, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Books, 2020), and elsewhere. She won first prize for Black Mountain Press’s The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018.

Natasha Sajé is the author of three books of poems including Vivarium (Tupelo Press, 2014); Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2014), a book of literary criticism; and Terroir: Love, Out of Place, a memoir-in-essays forthcoming this year from Trinity University Press. Sajé teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program and is a professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

Elizabeth Savage serves as poetry editor for Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art. Her new chapbook, Detail, is published by Dancing Girl Press.

Lucy Scott and Denice Gravenstijn are a translation team interested in making the work of people of color writing in Dutch available worldwide by translating it into English.

Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano received a BA in Mass Communication from Holy Cross of Davao College, where she developed her dedication to journalism and passion for creative writing. She works as a college instructor, teaching Development Communication at Southern Philippines Agribusiness and Marine and Aquatic School of Technology (SPAMAST)–Malita, Davao Occidental. She is proud of her Igorot, Kapampangan, and Blaan roots. Her writing is also her advocacy for the indigenous people of Davao del Sur, Philippines.

Translator Lucy Scott graduated from the Dutch language program at the University of Michigan in 2014, continuing her path to acquisition of the language through literary translation. She was helped in her translation and analysis of Vamba Sherif’s short story “Flame Trees” by Denice Gravenstijn and Annemarie Toebosch. Gravenstijn is a sociologist specializing in immigration studies. Toebosch is the director of Dutch and Flemish Studies at the University of Michigan. Vamba Sherif is a global writer based in the Netherlands whose work has been translated into English, French, German, Malayalam, Polish, and Spanish. “Flame Trees” is his American debut.

Vamba Sherif is a Liberian-born novelist, journalist, and film critic currently based in the Netherlands. His work, which is often set in Liberia or features Liberian-born characters in Europe, explores the themes of war, migration, alienation, and exile.

Sahith Shetty is an academic writer from Bangalore, India. His work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, and Unbroken Journal.

Martha Silano is the author of Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press). Martha’s poems appear in Poetry, the Paris Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and the Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Poetry. She teaches at Bellevue College.

Apol Sta. Maria is a visual artist and comics creator. Among his comics creations are Alamat ng Panget and Many Other, N. Tablado, and Ano? In 2013, his first solo exhibit, titled Oil on Canvas, was held at the Liongoren Gallery in Manila, Philippines.

Morgan Talty was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and grew up on the Penobscot Indian Nation in Maine. He received his BA in Native American studies from Dartmouth College and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast. His work appears or is forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Narrative, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Levant, Maine.

After moving from Mexico City to the United States, photographer Xavier Tavera experienced a sense of cultural alienation that compelled him to document the spaces, places, events, people, and artifacts of those living in marginalized communities. Tavera's images offer insight into the diversity of numerous subcultures, giving a voice to those who are often invisible. This exhibition focuses on the notion of borderlands as Tavera explores the echoes of cultural clashes at the United States/Mexican border that reverberate through other Latina/o/x geographies. Tavera has shown his work extensively nationally and internationally including in Germany, Scotland, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, and China. He lives and works in Minneapolis, where he teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Brandon Thurman is the author of the chapbook Strange Flesh (Quarterly West, 2018). His poetry can be found in the Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, RHINO, and others. He lives in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas with his husband and son. You can find him on Twitter @bthurman87.

María Alejandra Barrios Vélez is a writer born in Barranquilla, Colombia. She has lived in Bogotá and Manchester, where in 2016 she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Manchester. Her stories appear in Hobart, Pulp, Reservoir, Bandit Fiction, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Her poetry appears in the Acentos Review. Her work has been supported by organizations such as the Vermont Studio Center and the Caldera Arts Center.

A Maine native but an academic gypsy for much of her adult life, Anastasia Walker is a writer and scholar who lives and works in Pittsburgh. Her recent publications include the autobiographical essay “Memory’s Disavowed Daughter,” poems in several journals, and blog articles on politics and trans/LGBTQ+ issues for Huffington Post and Medium. Anastasia loves going for long walks and (when she visits home in the summers) swimming in the ocean.

Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019), and is a 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, his poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, the Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he lives in Oakland, California.

Michelle Whittaker is the author of Surge (great weather for MEDIA) and was awarded the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist Medal and 2017 NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry. Recent poems appear in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Southampton Review, Fjord Review, and other publications. She is an assistant professor in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University.

Gregg Williard is an author and artist whose fiction, nonfiction, and graphic art have appeared in New England Review, Raleigh Review, The Rupture, Into the Void, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. His drawings were the subject of a recent one-person exhibit at the Ohio State University Farmer Gallery, and his nonfiction essay, “MHW,” was awarded the Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival’s Brooklyn Nonfiction Prize in 2019. He does a late-night book reading show on WORT community radio, and teaches ESL to refugees in Madison, Wisconsin.