Contributors
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an award-winning translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world and beyond, and has translated over a dozen full-length books from three different languages. His most recent translation is Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Lockwood Press, 2021).
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.
Adonis, described by Edward Said as “the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity,” was born Ali Ahmed Said Esber in the Syrian village Al-Qassabin in 1930. A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Adonis initiated a revolution in the structures and themes of Arabic poetry. He has received numerous honors, including the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Goethe Prize, and the PEN/Nabokov Award. His book Songs of Mihyar the Damascene was published by New Directions Press in 2019.
Nadia Alexis is a poet and photographer born to Haitian immigrants in Harlem, New York City. Her poetry appears in Mud Season Review, MQR: Mixtape, Indiana Review, the Texas Review, and others. A 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest semifinalist and recipient of the 2019 honorable mention poetry prize for the Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, she has received fellowships from the Watering Hole and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She’s currently a creative writing PhD student at the University of Mississippi.
Asmaa Azaizeh is a poet, essayist, and editor based in Haifa. In 2010 Asmaa received the Debutant Writer Award from Al Qattan Foundation for her volume of poetry Liwa, (2011, Alahlia). She has published two other volumes of poetry: As the woman from Lod bore me (2015, Alahlia) and Don’t believe me if I talk of war (2019) in Arabic, Dutch, and Swedish. Asmaa has also published a bilingual poetry anthology in German and Arabic, Unturned stone (2017, Alahlia). She has contributed to and participated in various journals, anthologies, and poetry festivals around the world. Her poems have been translated into English, German, French, Persian, Swedish, Spanish, Greek, and more. Currently, she works as an editor for the Raseef22 newspaper.
Leigh Ann Beavers teaches Drawing and Printmaking at Washington and Lee University. She holds her MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madision. She spent portions of the last eight summers in residence on Aughnish Island in Ireland working on this project which has been exhibited at Courthouse Gallery (Kinvara, Ireland); Roanoke College (Salem, VA); and Winthrop University (Rock Hill, SC). This watercolor is from a mixed-media project that is a creative expression of reconciliation ecology, a branch of conservation biology seeking to preserve biodiversity in the midst of human development. Stemming from an urgent, personal imperative to recognize each individual species in her immediate environment, Beavers’ drawings, prints, collages, and installations draw attention to the myriad forms of life on the edges of our backyards, fields, and roadsides. She notes: “We are but one of 8.7 million species sharing this planet. As many conservationists have pointed out, no one will work to save what doesn't have a name, what they don't know exists.”
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St. Brigid Press. Her work appears in 32 Poems, the Southern Review, Subtropics, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Univerity of North Carolina Wilmington, where she has served since 2013 as editor of Ecotone, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.
Ariana Benson is a poet from Chesapeake, Virginia. She was a finalist in the 2019 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Pink Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in Anomaly, Lunch Ticket, Southern Humanities Review, and Auburn Avenue, where she serves as nonfiction editor, and are forthcoming in Great River Review and an upcoming Diode Editions anthology. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator. Her honors include a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has also been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Luisa’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, RHINO, Diode Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, the Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere.
Elliott Colla teaches Arabic at Georgetown University.
Whitney Collins is a 2020 Pushcart Prize recipient, a 2020 Pushcart Prize Special Mention recipient, and winner of American Short Fiction’s 2020 Short(er) Fiction Prize. Her debut story collection, Big Bad (Sarabande Books), won the 2019 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Slice, The Pinch, Grist, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, the Chattahoochee Review, and Catapult’s Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror anthology, among others.
Meredith Hobbs Coons is a writer and musician from Nipomo, California. She obtained her BA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, then studied communication disorders and sciences at California State University, Northridge, achieving a master’s degree. Her written work appears in North of the Internet, Coyote + Oak, and Talkhouse. She records and performs companionate, lyrical folk songs as Lamb’s Ear. She lives with her partner, her two children, three cats, and a dog.
Rachelle Cruz is the author of God's Will for Monsters (Inlandia, 2017), which won an American Book Award in 2018 and the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Prize. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology of Philippine Myths (Carayan Press, 2015) with Lis P. Sipin-Gabon. Her most recent book, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing and Creating Comics, was published in fall 2018. She was appointed the 2018-2020 Inlandia Literary Laureate during which she founded a summer writing program for young people, Poetry is Power, among other community projects. She lives and writes in Southern California.
Najwan Darwish is one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of the Palestinian struggle. He has published eight books in Arabic, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. NYRB Poets published Darwish’s collections Nothing More to Lose (2014) and Exhausted on the Cross (2021). Darwish lives between Haifa and his birthplace, Jerusalem.
A native of Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is the author of The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip Press, 2020) and No God in This Room (Argus House Press, 2018). Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books, 2018) and in various publications including GAY Magazine and Narratively. She resides in Philadelphia.
Renee Emerson is a homeschooling mom of six, and the author of Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014), Threshing Floor (Jacar Press, 2016), and Church Ladies (Fernwood Press, forthcoming 2022). Her poetry has been published in Cumberland River Review, The Windhover, and Poetry South. She adjunct teaches online for Indiana Wesleyan University, and blogs about poetry, grief, and motherhood.
Heid E. Erdrich is author of Little Big Bully (National Poetry Series, 2019) and six other poetry collections. In addition, she edited New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018). Heid is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She teaches in the low-residency MFA in creative writing program at Augsburg University. Heid was the 2021 Glasgow distinguished writer-in-residence (virtual) at Washington and Lee University.
Trinidad Escobar is a cartoonist, poet, and musician in Northern California. Her work appears in literary journals and publications like The Nib, NPR, and the New Yorker. Trinidad was named as one of YBCA’s most influential global artists in 2019. In 2020, her works were featured in Eisner and Ignatz-winning anthologies like Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival (Abrams, 2019) and Be Gay, Do Comics (IDW, 2020). Her comics will be exhibited in the first-ever international Women in Comics exhibition in Italy, 2021. Her forthcoming books will be published by Black Josei Press and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds. Mississippi, her fifth, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay. With Laura-Gray Street, Ann coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology. A senior fellow of Black Earth Institute, she was 2017 poet-in-residence at Randolph College, and has had numerous residencies as well as Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. A professor of English, she directs the environmental studies program at the University of Mississippi.
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with MS who served as the second poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of five books of poetry, including her latest, Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the 2015 Moon City Poetry Award and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association’s 2017 Elgin Award. Her work appears in journals like the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Twitter and Instagram: @webbish6.
Janelle Garcia’s short stories and graphic narratives appear in Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review Online, Quarter After Eight, and the Florida Review, among other journals. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University, and she writes, draws, and teaches from South Florida.
Soukaina Habiballah is a Moroccan poet, novelist, and screenwriter, who has published four poetry collections, two novels, and one short story collection. She has received a number of awards including the 2015 Buland Al Haidari Prize, a Maydan Floating Voices Award, and the Nadine Shames Prize for Arab Screenwriter for her short film Who Left the Door Open?. She was a resident at the International Writing Program in Iowa in 2019.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (2015), a collaborative book, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (2014) and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (2010). Her translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (2020) and Claire Malroux’s Daybreak (2020). A Different Distance, a collaboration with Karthika Naïr, will be published in December 2021.
Ahmed Hassan is a poet, lawyer, and activist in Cairo, Egypt.
Donna Hemans is the author of two novels: River Woman and Tea by the Sea. Her short fiction and essays appear in the Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Ms., and Electric Lit, among others. She lives in Maryland and is the owner of DC Writers Room, a coworking studio for writers.
Mariam Hijjawi is a Palestinian educator with a passion for playing with words, music, and paint. She takes a special interest in facilitating group singing and social games and an interest in the arts and their immense value for all.
Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Book Prize, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Common, Plume, Ecotone, the Hopkins Review, Smartish Pace, Poetry Daily, The Best American Poetry, and other publications. She is an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of My Monticello, a debut of five stories and a novella all set in Virginia, exploring American Identity, belonging and freedom, forthcoming from Henry Holt in October, 2021. Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; her writing appears in Guernica, The Guardian, Phoebe, Prime Number Magazine, and elsewhere. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2018, guest edited by Roxane Gay, who called it, “one hell of a story,” and was read live by LeVar Burton as part of PRI’s Selected Shorts series. A veteran public school art teacher, Johnson lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is the recipient of the inaugural Vijay Nambisan Fellowship 2019. She was the Charles Wallace Fellow writer-in-residence (2018-2019) at the University of Stirling. An awardee of the GREAT scholarship, she has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from the University of Plymouth. Her dissertation concentrated on a comparative literature study exploring postcolonial ecocriticism in the works of Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal.
Martha Lundin is a genderqueer writer and educator living in Minnesota. They graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s MFA program in 2017. Their work appears in Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, Entropy, and others.
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.
Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese writer and human rights activist. She has published two novels in Arabic—Green Flash (2006) and Son of the Sun (2013)—as well as a short story collection, Thirteen Months of Sunrise, which was translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette and published by Comma Press in 2018. Her stories and articles have been widely published and she has also worked as an editor on the culture pages of Al-Thaqafi magazine.
Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. She is the author of The Driveway Has Two Sides, published by Fairlight Books. Her memoir, Proof of Loss, was published by Otis Books. Her new novel Becoming Delilah was published in August 2023 and her essay "Haunted" was a Notable Mention in Best American Essays and Nonfiction 2021. Sara is a founding editor of the literary magazine Writers Resist.
Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020), which won the 2019 Backbone Press Chapbook Competition, and Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, forthcoming 2021). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Waxwing, The Common, and elsewhere. She teaches at Claremont McKenna College.
Khaled Mattawa is the William Wilhartz Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest book of poems is Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf, 2020). A MacArthur Fellow, he is the current editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.
Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in poetry, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her next book, Useful Junk, is due out in 2022 from BOA Editions. She is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English based in Cape Town, South Africa. His translations of prose and poetry appear in Blackbox Manifold, the White Review, Tentacular, Seedings, the Johannesburg Review of Books, Washington Square Review, and others. He has translated several novels and prose works into English including Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep (Seagull Press), Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping (Two Lines Press), and The Crocodiles (Seven Stories) by Youssef Rakha.
Luke Munson’s work appears in Arcturus and Mirage #5. He wrote and helped produce, with the LA artists’ collective Die Kränken, a video play which was in exhibition at the Univeristy of Southern California’s ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in 2017. He has an MA in poetry from the University of California, Davis and lives in the Bay Area.
Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929–2013) is one of the giants of Egyptian colloquial Arabic poetry. He is most famous for his political poems, especially his satires of the country’s ruling elites. Most audiences know his poetry through the songs of his collaborator, the singer-composer Sheikh Imam. Negm had the distinction of being imprisoned many times by Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak.
Breena Nuñez is a cartoonist, educator, and the other half of the newly launched small press, Laneha House. She creates memoir comics inspired by the nuances of existing as a queer AfroSalvadoran-Guatemalan from the Bay Area, and she often uses comics as an outlet to express the joys and awkwardness that comes with their identity. You can find more of their comics through online publications like the New Yorker: Daily Shouts and The Nib.
Carolyn Oliver’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, the Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, FIELD, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Laurence Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from the Worcester Review, where she now serves as coeditor. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family.
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.
Allen M. Price has an MA in journalism from Emerson College. His essay, "Running From Blackness," published in the Masters Review, was a 2020 nonfiction finalist for the 50th New Millennium Writings Award. His fiction and nonfiction work appears or is forthcoming in Terrain.org, Hobart, upstreet, Transition Magazine, Zone 3, Entropy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Juked, River Teeth, the Fourth River (chosen by guest editor Ira Sukrungruang), Jellyfish Review, Bayou, Sou'wester, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gertrude Press, the Adirondack Review, the Saturday Evening Post, and others. An excerpt of his screenplay appears in the Louisville Review. His chapbook The Unintended Consequences of Haitian Reparation appears in Hawai'i Review.
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist, essayist, and poet who writes in both Arabic and English. Born, raised, and based in Cairo, he graduated from Hull University in 1998, and has worked as a cultural journalist, literary translator, and creative writing coach. He is the founding editor of the bilingual website the Sultan’s Seal: Cairo's coolest cosmopolitan hotel, named after his acclaimed first novel, The Book of the Sultan's Seal.
Sania Saleh was a Syrian poet born in 1935 in the city of Musayaf in the province of Hama, author of three collections of poetry and one of short stories, as well as a posthumously published Collected Poems. She studied at Damascus University, and married the poet Mohammed al-Maghout, whom she met through poet Adonis in Beirut, himself married to her sister, Khalida Saïd. They had two daughters. Sania Saleh died of cancer in Paris in 1986. The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal has an essay on her work that can be read online here.
Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer living in Paris. Her essays, poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French appear widely, including in Harper’s, the Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently working on a new translation of One Thousand and One Nights for W. W. Norton. Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi, a collaborative project with Robin Moger, is forthcoming from Tenement Press.
Simon Shieh is a poet, essayist, and educator living in Beijing. A lifelong martial artist, Simon competed in his first professional Muay Thai fight at seventeen years old in Shanghai. The day before he turned twenty-one, Simon suffered his first and only loss by knockout in Brazil. Soon after, he turned away from fighting and found poetry. The work of Jericho Brown, Eduardo Corral, Louise Glück, Terrance Hayes, Ocean Vuong, Lucie Brock-Broido, and many others opened the doors for his poems.
Grace Singh Smith was born and raised in a village by the Barak River in Assam, India. Her fiction and nonfiction appears in Santa Monica Review, AGNI, Cleaver, Aster(ix), the Texas Review, and elsewhere. Her short stories have been selected for the 2018 Best of the Net anthology, and cited as notable in The Best American Short Stories 2016. She is working on her first novel, Goddess of Spiders, and is blog editor at AGNI.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of over ten books, most recently Orexia: Poems (2017) and the forthcoming Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (2021). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEH Distinguished Professorship. Her “Second Acts” column on second books of poetry is a regular feature at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is professor and director of creative writing at the University of Virginia.
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.
Originally from Virginia, Jenniey Tallman lives in Iowa City where she teaches, edits, and works for the hospital. Supported and/or recognized by The Pushcart Prize, Pen America, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, recent work is in Mid-American Review, Waxwing, DIAGRAM, and Electric Lit. She keeps an experimental poetry blog and is currently at work on a novel, a hybrid manuscript, and—with her husband and their three sons—a school bus conversion.
JP Vallières is from the Village of Adams. He is the author of the novel, The Ketchup Factory. He lives with Kimmy and their four sons in northern Idaho.
Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of two books of poetry, most recently The Spinning Place, winner of the 2018 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, the Cincinnati Review, and Literary Matters. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, poet Mark Wagenaar, and their two kids.
Yun Wei received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, and studied international relations and health economics at Georgetown and London School of Economics. Her awards include the Geneva Writers Group Literary Prizes and Himan Brown Poetry Fellowship. Her poetry and fiction are forthcoming or appear in Michigan Quarterly, the Summerset Review, Poetry Northwest, Wigleaf, and several other journals. She works in global health in Switzerland, where she relies on chocolate and tears to survive mountain sports.
Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a Chicago-based poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. Their second chapbook, GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Chen Chen, was part of the 2019-2020 Glass Chapbook series. He cofounded and edits Underblong. Recent work appears in Moon City Review, Sundog Lit, and Perhappened Mag, among others.
Holly M. Wendt is associate professor of English and director of creative writing at Lebanon Valley College and a recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Jentel Foundation, and the Hambidge Center. Their writing appears in Four Way Review, Barrelhouse, Memorious, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Lesley Wheeler is Shenandoah's poetry editor. Her new books are The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her essay collection Poetry’s Possible Worlds is forthcoming in 2021. Her poems and essays appear in Kenyon Review, Ecotone, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Saadi Youssef (1934-2021) is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the Arab world. He was born near Basra, Iraq. Following his experience as a political prisoner in Iraq, he has spent most of his life in exile, working as a teacher and literary journalist throughout North Africa and the Middle East. He is the author of over forty books of poetry. Youssef has also published two novels and a book of short stories, and several books of essay and memoir. Youssef, who spent the last two decades of his life in London, was a leading translator to Arabic of works by Walt Whitman, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Federic Garcia Lorca, among many others.