Contributors

p. hodges adams is a poet and playwright from a small town in Michigan. Currently, they are an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, Arkansas International, Pine Hills Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Bombus Press. They were a finalist for both the 2021 Connecticut River Review Experimental Poetry Prize and the 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Hopefully they will transform into a beam of sunlight someday soon.

Farah Ali is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her work appears in Copper Nickel, Arkansas International, the Kenyon Review, and Ecotone. She received a special mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize XLII for a story that appears in J Journal, and was the winner of the 2016 Colorado Review Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. She also won the fall 2018 Copper Nickel Editors Prize in prose.

Lauren K. Alleyne is the award-winning author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), and is coeditor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). A 2020 nominee for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry and finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards, Alleyne is currently a professor of English at James Madison University and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center.

Yasmine Ameli is an Iranian American poet and essayist based outside Boston. She holds a BA in English from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Virginia Tech. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, Narrative, Black Warrior Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing through the Loft Literary Center, and you can find her on Instagram @yasmineameli.

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming at HuffPost, CNN, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Rust + Moth, the Indianapolis Review, the West Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. Follow her on Twitter @ALAuchter.

Jan Beatty’s sixth book is The Body Wars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said, “Jan Beatty’s new poems in The Body Wars shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters.” Beatty won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard, published in 2021. A new chapbook, Skydog, will be published by Lefty Blondie Press in March 2022.

Anne P. Beatty is a writer whose essays appear in the American Scholar, The Atlantic online, New England Review online, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Her work has been listed among The Best American Essays 2019 Notable Essays. She lives with her husband and three children in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she is a high school English teacher.

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season, forthcoming in March 2022. She’s currently writing a biography of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Also a journalist, her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Guardian, and NPR. She is a professor at Middlebury College where she also directs the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. 

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Four Way Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, and Thrush, among other journals, and she was awarded the 2021 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She’s the coordinator of the MFA program at University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches poetry and publishing.

Jessica Cuello is the author of Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, and the author of Yours, Creature, forthcoming from JackLeg Press in spring of 2023. She is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded the 2017 CNY Book Award, the 2016 Washington Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is a poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review.

Aidan Daniel (she/her) is a writer and visual artist from Virginia. She is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing at Randolph College and is the assistant managing editor of Revolute. Her work can be found in Booth, Perhappened, Maudlin House, HAD, and many scattered papers on her desk.

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.

August Donovan is a senior at Washington & Lee University, pursuing BAs in English and computer science. An intern and editorial assistant at Shenandoah, he is exploring careers in book publishing, manuscript editing, and technical writing.

Jenzo DuQue is a Colombian American writer and criminal defense investigator. His work has been published in The Best American Short Stories 2021, Narrative, BOMB, & elsewhere. Follow his antics on Twitter @papiwhathappen.

Kristin Emanuel holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Kansas, where she studied speculative ecopoetics and the comics poetry movement. She is now a PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems and comics appear in The Normal School, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Grub Street Volume 70. She also has poetry forthcoming in The Rupture.

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.

Joshua Garcia’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, The Shore, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and is a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.

Anthony Gomez III is based in Brooklyn, New York. An emerging writer and current PhD student at Stony Brook University, his research explores questions of race, diaspora, and the Anthropocene. His other stories are forthcoming in Gone Lawn, 3Elements, and the Bookends Review.

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.

Melissa Helton is from the Great Lakes region of Ohio and raises a family, teaches, and writes in Southeast Kentucky. Her work appears in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Cutleaf, Still: The Journal, Appalachian Review, Norwegian Writers Climate Campaign, and more. Her chapbooks include Inertia: A Study (Finishing Line Press, 2016), which explores her father’s death, and Hewn (Workhorse, 2021), which deals with issues of queerness and polyamory in Appalachia.

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.

Erin Hoover is the author of Barnburner (Elixir Press, 2018), winner of a Florida Book Award in poetry. Recent poems appear in the Cincinnati Review, the Florida Review, and Poetry Northwest. Hoover has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry and Best New Poets. She teaches poetry at Tennessee Tech as an assistant professor.

Sylvia Jones is a writer, editor, and prison abolitionist. At the moment, she serves as a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow. She works as an associate editor for West Branch and as a poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press. She also intermittently reads for Ploughshares. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Poet Lore, the Hopkins Review, the Santa Clara Review, Shenandoah, Revolute, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and has received support from the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts; PEN America; Topical Cream; Poets at the End of the World; Literary Cleveland; The Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Community Center of New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore with her partner Agata and their buff tabby, Theo.

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.

Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her writing appears in Granta, Slice, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, The Independent, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor of Peaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She earned her BA in art and archaeology from Princeton University. Her debut novel, Beasts of a Little Land (Ecco Press, 2021), will be published around the world in 2022.

Rebecca Kwee is a writer, critic, and educator who creates stories and curricula on decolonization. Her writing on postcolonial identity and culture has been published in Catapult, Hyperallergic, and Singapore Unbound. She is currently reviewing a series of Southeast Asian films as a member of Singapore International Film Festival’s Youth Jury. Find her on Twitter @SingaporeOtter and on Instagram @decolonizemyspice.

Hea-Ream Lee is a writer from the East Coast living in the desert. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona, where she teaches undergraduate students and edited fiction for Sonora Review. Hea-Ream’s work appears and is forthcoming in Terrain.org, Popula, Hobart, and others, and she has received a fellowship from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She is working on a book about seed banks and longing.

Tracy Lum is a writer and software engineer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her nonfiction appears in Polygon, Bustle, HerStry, the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Entropy, and Little Old Lady Comedy. A Best of Net 2021 nominee, she is currently working on a novel inspired by her family's experiences in Manhattan's Chinatown.

Robert Wood Lynn’s debut poetry collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2022) was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His work has been featured in Antioch Review, Blackbird, New Ohio Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other publications. He is an MFA student at New York University where he teaches in the undergraduate creative-writing program. He lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

S.S. Mandani is a writer, runner, and barista from New York City. He studied fiction at The University of Florida and holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. His stories appear in Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y, Storm Cellar, Orca, New World Writing, and elsewhere. His novel-in-progress explores Sufi mysticism, climate change, and a dysfunctional family of jinn. He writes about drinks and culture for “Liquid Carriage” at No Contact and radios @SuhailMandani.

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of the novels To Sleep as Animals and Our Shadows’ Voice, the collection Blue of the World, and several chapbooks and multidisciplinary collaborations. His honors include prizes from the Pushcart Foundation, the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Glimmer Train, and RA & Pin Drop Studios, among others. He lives with his domestic and creative partner, Genevieve Johnson, in the industrial riverscape of Saco, Maine.

Emily Nason is from Columbia, South Carolina, and has an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia. Her poetry appears in the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere.

January Gill O'Neil is the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press, and is an associate professor at Salem State University. From 2019–2020, she served as the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Jon Pineda is the author of six books, most recently the novel Let’s No One Get Hurt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). He teaches at William & Mary.

John Poch’s most recent book is Texases (WordFarm, 2019). His poems appear widely in magazines such as the Paris Review, Poetry, the Sewanee Review, and The Nation. He teaches in the creative-writing program at Texas Tech University. 

Cleo Qian is a writer based in New York.

Maggie Queeney is the author of Settler, forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize and The Ruth Stone Scholarship, her most recent work is found or forthcoming in the New Republic, Guernica, the Missouri Review, and the American Poetry Review, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University and reads and writes in Chicago.

Kiran Kaur Saini is a recipient of the Henfield Prize in Fiction and has been a Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists’ Program. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. A 15-year veteran of the Los Angeles film industry, Kiran has been caring for her mom in North Carolina throughout the pandemic.

aureleo sans is a writer based in San Antonio, Texas. He is an alumnus of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and the 2021 Tin House Summer Workshop and a reader at jmww. His work is forthcoming in Boston Review, the 2022 Roots. Wounds. Words. anthology, The Offing, Passages North, and The Commuter. You can find him on Twitter at @aureleos.

Alanna Schubach’s debut novel, The Nobodies, will be published by Blackstone in June 2022. Her short fiction appears in the Sewanee Review, the Massachusetts Review, Juked, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in New York, where she works as a creative-writing teacher and freelance journalist.

Celeste Sea lives in Washington, DC. Her work appears in Sine Theta Magazine, A Velvet Giant, Perhappened, Trampset, Tiny Molecules, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She’s thinking about starting a novel. Maybe. Find her on Twitter @celestish_.

Coyote Shook is a PhD candidate in American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where they are also a cartoonist and baker. Their comics have been featured in a range of American and Canadian literary magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review, The Puritan, Santa Fe Writers Project, and the Florida Review. Their debut graphic novel, Coyote the Beautiful, won the 2019 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Contest with the Florida Review, the first comic to do so. Their research and baking, on the other hand, are both just OK. 

Shell St. James is a North Carolina author and visual artist living in an 1895 farmhouse with her musician soulmate, feline muse, and a benevolent ghost. Her short stories appear in Night Terrors 12, Hippocampus, and EPOCH, among others. She is currently querying her first novel, The Mermaid of Agawam Bay, while working on her second YA novel, Romance Is Dead. Connect with her on Twitter @shellstjames1.

Stephen P. Thomas’s stories, essays, and travel writing appear in magazines and journals including the North American Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Baltimore Review. A graduate of Haverford College and the University of Arizona, he lives with his wife and children in Central Texas and works as a speech-language pathologist in the public schools. 

Taku Ward is a cartoonist from New Jersey. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2020 with a BFA in cartooning. His comics have been published in anthologies such as Level Ground Comics’ The Greatest Hits: A Comic Mixtape, and Bonfire Comics’ Stratos: A Dream Anthology. In his free time, he likes to go on walks and draw cute animals. You can see more of his work on Instagram @twardart.

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.

G.H. Yamauchi has lived most of her life in Southwest Ohio, Bangkok, and New York City; she now lives in Jersey City and works in the South Bronx. She earned an MFA from the New School and received an Artist’s Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature from New York Foundation of the Arts. Her graphic narratives have appeared in Electric Literature’s “The Commuter,” Moon City Review, and SalonZine.