Contributors
Isabel Acevedo is a nominee for The Pushcart Prize and two-time winner of the Academy of American Poets University Prize. Her poems appear in such magazines as Birdfeast, Puerto Del Sol, Aster(ix), Berkeley Poetry Review, and others.
Essam M. Al-Jassim is a Saudi translator. He taught English for many years at Royal Commission schools in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. He received his bachelor’s degree in foreign languages and education from King Faisal University, Hofuf. His translations appear in a variety of online and print Arabic and English literary journals.
Xhenet Aliu’s novel, Brass, was awarded the biennial Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel prize, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a best book of 2018 by a number of media outlets. Her previous story collection, Domesticated Wild Things, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. Currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University, his poems appear or are forthcoming in Memorious, The Rumpus, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Four Way Review, and others.
Lynette Benton is a nonfiction writer and instructor living in Greater Boston. Two of her essays have garnered first prize or finalist status in literary contests. Two others have been anthologized. Her articles and personal essays appear in numerous online and paper publications, as well as on a literary podcast. Most recently her essays appear in the Avalon Literary Review and Passager literary journals.
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.
Sarah Beth Childers is the author of the essay collection Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family (Ohio University Press, 2013). Her essays also appear in Brevity, [PANK], Colorado Review, Quiddity, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Oklahoma State University, serves as the nonfiction editor of the Cimarron Review, and juggles online pandemic teaching with her new baby girl.
Clayton Adam Clark lives in St. Louis, his hometown, where he works as a public health researcher and volunteers for River Styx magazine. His debut poetry collection, A Finitude of Skin (Moon City Press, 2018), won the Moon City Poetry Award. He is a recipient of an Artist Support Grant from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, and his poems appear in Salamander, Ocean City Review, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in poetry at Ohio State University and recently completed his master’s in clinical mental health counseling at University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Brandon Clippinger grew up in South Florida and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he practices law. His fiction also appears in the Carolina Quarterly.
Amy Collier once saw Fabio at an airport. Fabio is an Italian model who has appeared on many classic romance novels, such as Love Me with Fury, Lovestorm, and More Than a Feeling. He has been the spokesperson for The Geek Squad, Oral-B Sensitive Advantage toothbrush, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, Versace, and the American Cancer Society. He is 6'3" barefoot; usually in cowboy boots. You can follow Amy on Twitter @Amy_Corp and on Instagram @collier.amy.
Brian Komei Dempster’s debut book of poems, Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), received the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry. His second poetry collection, Seize, was published by Four Way Books in fall 2020. Dempster is editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). He is a professor of rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies program.
Danielle Cadena Deulen is an assistant professor for the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and hosts Lit from the Basement a literary podcast and radio show (at KMUZ 100.7 FM). She is the author of a memoir, The Riots; two poetry collections, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us and Lovely Asunder; and a poetry chapbook, American Libretto.
Hannah Dow is the author of Rosarium (Acre Books, 2018), with poems recently appearing in Image, the Southern Review, and the Cincinnati Review, among others. She received the 2019 Cream City Review Summer Prize in poetry, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and has received awards and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Orion. Hannah serves as editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal and is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at Missouri Southern State University.
Aja Couchois Duncan is a social justice coach and capacity builder of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent who lives on the ancestral and stolen land of the Coastal Miwok people. Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) was selected by Entropy magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and awarded the California Book Award for poetry in 2017. Her lyric novel, Vestigial, is forthcoming from Litmus Press in the spring of 2021.
Being an academic not paid enough for her trouble, Ana Fores-Tamayo wanted instead to do something that mattered: work with asylum seekers. She advocates for marginalized refugee families from Mexico and Central America. Working with asylum seekers is heart wrenching, yet satisfying. In parallel, poetry is her escape. Her work appears in the Raving Press, the Laurel Review, Indolent Books, and many other anthologies and journals, both online and in print. Her poetry in translation and photography have been featured at home and internationally. Through poetry, she keeps tilting at windmills.
Emily Franklin’s work appears or is forthcoming in the New York Times, the Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Guernica, Blackbird, Tar River Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, Lunch Ticket, Passages North, North Dakota Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Juked, and the Chattahoochee Review among other places. Her work has also been featured on National Public Radio, long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut collection, Tell Me How You Got Here, will be published by Terrapin Books in January 2021.
Nancy Miller Gomez’s work appears or is forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, The Rumpus, River Styx, Rattle, Catamaran, Bellingham Review, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Punishment, was published by Rattle. She has an MFA from Pacific University and cofounded Poetry in the Jails, a program that provides poetry workshops to incarcerated men and women.
Molly Gutman is a writer from Arkansas whose fiction appears in Granta, One Story, Lightspeed, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Molly's the managing editor of Cream City Review and a doctoral fellow in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada-Reno. Say hello on Twitter @mollyegutman.
Mason Andrew Hamberlin is a queer writer, editor, bookseller, trash kid, and MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. Their work appears in Ninth Letter, the Adroit Journal, the Boiler, Voicemail Poems, Duende, VIATOR, and others. They live and teach in Iowa City—though Chapel Hill, North Carolina will always be home. Say hi on Instagram @definitely_not_mason.
Travis Head’s drawings and artist’s books have been exhibited throughout the United States. He has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Ox-Bow, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and he is a 2015 recipient of a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship. His work has been discussed in the Washington Post and reproduced in Syracuse University’s journal Stone Canoe and Manifest’s International Drawing Annual 7. His collective, The Four-footed Fellows Correspondence Club, has exhibited nationally, as well as in Norway and Qatar. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a BA from the University of Mary Washington and is associate professor of drawing at Virginia Tech’s School of Visual Art.
Rachel Heng is the author of the novels The Great Reclamation (forthcoming from Riverhead in 2022) and Suicide Club (Henry Holt, 2018), which was translated into ten languages worldwide and won the Gladstone Library Writer-In-Residence Award 2020. Rachel’s short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, been listed among Best American Short Stories' Distinguished Stories, and published in Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions, Best Singaporean Short Stories, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has been listed among The Best American Essays’s Notable Essays and has been published in The Rumpus, The Telegraph, and elsewhere.
J.D. Ho was born by the sea, raised on a rock, drove to Austin, Texas for an MFA, and now lives among hawks on a major flyway. J.D.’s work appears in the Georgia Review, the Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals.
Jen Schalliol Huang lives near Boston and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her chapbook was printed through the Kenyon Review, and her work appears or is upcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Flock, RHINO Poetry, The Shore, Sou’wester, and elsewhere. She is a reader/writer for [PANK], a three-time nominee for The Pushcart Prize, twice for Best New Poets, and a candidate for 2020’s Best of the Net.
Lesley Jenike’s poems and essays appear in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, the Bennington Review, the Rumpus, Rattle, Verse, and many other journals. Her most recent books are poetry collections Holy Island (Gold Wake, 2014), and Punctum (Kent State University Press, 2017). She teaches creative writing and literature at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio where she lives with her husband and children.
Leslie Jernegan lost her first tooth in a bar—a rite of passage for any Wisconsin child. She thinks that says everything you need to know. Since returning to the United States from what she thought would be a year as a Fulbright grantee in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she’s been adventuring into the world of online teaching. She’s a graduate of Virginia Tech’s MFA program, and has since found herself crawling west.
Ashley M. Jones is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2016), dark//thing (Pleiades Press, 2019), and Reparations Now! (Hub City Press, 2021). Her work has earned fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. She is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham, Alabama, and she codirects PEN America’s Birmingham chapter. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
John Kinsella’s new book of poetry is Insomnia (W. W. Norton, 2020). He is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and emeritus professor of literature and environment at Curtin University, Western Australia.
Andrew Kozma’s poems appear in Blackbird, The Believer, Redactions, and Bennington Review. His first book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.
Born in Asheville, Grey Wolfe LaJoie is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Their writing and visual art appear or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Salt Hill, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, Carolina Quarterly, and New Delta Review, among other journals. Thank you for visiting their bio.
Mark Laliberte is a writer-artist-designer with an MFA from University of Guelph. He has exhibited extensively in galleries across Canada and the United States, curates the online experimental comics site The 4PANEL Project, and edits the hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL. Laliberte has had pageworks, poems, and other print experiments appear in publications big and small, including Ink Brick, Poetry, Prairie Fire, and Vallum. Publications include BRICKBRICKBRICK (BookThug, 2010) and Asemanticasymmetry (Anstruther Press, 2016). Laliberte is a member of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE.
Mirinae Lee was born and grew up in Seoul. Her short fiction appears in the Antioch Review, Meridian, Black Warrior Review, and Pleiades. She received the 2018 Editors’ Prize in fiction from Meridian and the Esther MK Cheung Memorial Prize from the University of Hong Kong.
Jenny Lesser is an artist from Seattle. Her comics appear or are forthcoming in several publications, including Narrative Magazine and The Offing. Her watercolor and mixed-media paintings have been included in shows in Minneapolis and Seattle. She also makes giant painted pillows and hand drawn step-and-repeats for rock shows.
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.
Abbasid poet Ulayya bint al-Mahdī was, as her name alludes, daughter of the caliph al-Mahdī, but was also sister to Harun al-Rashid, whose legend features prominently in the 1,001 Nights. In addition to her talent in verse, she was also acclaimed for her musical gifts.
Francesca Manfredi was born in Reggio Emilia in 1988 and lives in Turin, Italy. Her debut short story collection, Un buon posto dove stare, won the Premio Campiello Opera Prima and was shortlisted for the Premio Settembrini, Premio Chiara, Premio Berto and Premio Zocca Giovani. Her short stories appear in several contemporary Italian magazines, collections, and in the Japanese anthology Somewhere, in a safe place. In 2019 she published her first novel, L’impero della polvere (The Empire of Dirt).
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.
Jason Ockert is the author of Wasp Box, a novel, and two collections of short stories, Neighbors of Nothing and Rabbit Punches. His honors include the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, the Atlantic Monthly Fiction Contest, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, as well as inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories. His stories appear or are forthcoming in Granta, Oxford American, McSweeney’s, and One Story. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.
Born in Austin, Texas, Will Pewitt now lives in Jacksonville, Florida where he teaches global literature. He publishes in a variety of genres, from fiction and poetry to history and philosophy.
Nathan Poole is the author of two books of fiction: Father Brother Keeper, a collection of stories selected by Edith Pearlman for the 2013 Mary McCarthy Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize; and Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost, selected by Benjamin Percy as the winner of the 2014 Quarterly West Novella Contest. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has served as a Tennessee Williams Scholar, a Milton Fellow, and a Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama.
Shelley Puhak is a poet and writer from Maryland. She is the author of two books of poetry, the more recent of which is Guinevere in Baltimore, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in the Cincinnati Review, the Missouri Review, Verse Daily, and other journals and anthologies.
Lucy Rand lives in Norwich in the United Kingdom and is a literary translator from Italian, editor, and teacher of English as a foreign language. She translated the international bestseller The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina (Manilla, 2020) while living in Japan. She also has a blog where she reviews Italian books that are not yet translated into English.
Stephanie Rogers grew up in Middletown, Ohio. She holds degrees from the Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, and her poems appear or are forthcoming in journals such as Ploughshares, Tin House, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, and the Best New Poets anthology, among others. Her first collection of poems, Plucking the Stinger, was published by Saturnalia Books, and her second collection, Fat Girl Forms, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2021.
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. frank: sonnets is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2021. Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Derek Sheffield’s collection Not for Luck, which will be published by Michigan State University Press in 2021, was selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, he coedited Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2020). He lives with his family on the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.
Samyak Shertok’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Blackbird, the Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, the Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2020 National Poetry Series finalist, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and The Best Small Fictions, and received an Association of Writers & Writing Programs Intro Journals Award in 2020.
Mike Soto’s debut book-length work of poetry, A Grave is Given Supper, will be published by Deep Vellum Books in summer 2020.
Laura Price Steele is a writer and editor. Though originally from Colorado, she now lives in Wilmington, North Carolina where she earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has been the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Contest in nonfiction as well as the Montana Prize in fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in CutBank, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Cream City Review, among others. Currently she is working on a novel.
Stacey Waite is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is the author of: Choke, Love Poem to Androgyny, the lake has no saint, and Butch Geography. Waite’s poems appear in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Cherry Tree, and Court Green. Waite’s newest book is a mixed genre text entitled, Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
Maged N. Walle is an Iraqi short story writer. He was born and raised in Baghdad in 1962. Mr. Walle moved to Germany in 1991. Many of his writings appear in major Arabic literary journals. His collection of very short stories The Song of Destiny (2018) garnered him critical acclaim.
Janelle M. Williams received her BA from Howard University and her MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville College. She was a 2017 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. She is currently a flash fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine and a nonfiction editor for Inkwell Journal. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Prairie Schooner, the Normal School, Kweli, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, SmokeLong Quarterly, midnight & indigo, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere.
Angus Woodward was raised by southerners in the Midwest. His works of fiction are Down at the End of the River (Margaret Media, 2008), Americanisation (Livingston Press, 2011), and Oily (Spaceboy Books, 2018). Other graphic memoirs appear in Split Rock Review, Lumina, OBELUS, Slag Glass City, and others. His work is currently being serialized by Hobart. Angus lives, writes, and teaches in Baton Rouge.