Contributors
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, The Sun, Southern Review, Narrative, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing through the Loft Literary Center and Grub Street and works independently as a writing life coach. You can find her on Instagram @yasmineameli.
Simone Muench is the recipient of an National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and author of six full-length books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with Jackie K. White, was published by BLP (2021), and she has recent collaborative work in APR, the Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, and others. She serves as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, and poetry editor for JackLeg Press.
Jackie K. White is the author of three previous chapbooks and the co-author, with Simone Muench, of Hex & Howl (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). A former professor of English at Lewis University, her poems, translations, and collaborative poems have appeared in such journals as Third Coast, the Hopkins Review, and The Journal.Tacey M. Atsitty is Tsénahabiłnii and born for Ta'neeszahnii. Her work appears or is forthcoming in EPOCH, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poem-a-Day, and other publications. Her book is Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). She holds an MFA from Cornell University and is currently a PhD student at Florida State University. She lives in Tallahassee with her husband.
Mildred K. Barya is a writer from Uganda and Assistant Professor of creative writing and world literature at University of North Carolina at Asheville. Her publications include three poetry books, as well as fiction, creative nonfiction, poems, and hybrids forthcoming or published in Joyland, the Cincinnati Review, the Georgia Review, African American Review, Nowhere, Ruminate Magazine, Tin House, Obsidian, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Quarterly, Asymptote, Matters of Feminist Practice Anthology, Prairie Schooner, New Daughters of Africa International Anthology, Per Contra, and Northeast Review. She blogs here and is at work on a collection of nonfiction essays.
Rebecca Bernard’s work appears or is forthcoming in Southwest Review, J Journal, Colorado Review, and Pleiades among other places. Her debut collection of stories, Our Sister Who Will Not Die, was selected by Nick White as the winner of the 2021 Non/Fiction Collection Prize held by The Journal and is forthcoming from Mad Creek Books in August 2022. She is an Assistant Professor at Angelo State University and serves as a fiction editor for The Boiler.
Adrian Blevins is the author of the forthcoming Status Pending (Four Way Books, 2023), Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, and Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a co-edited collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, among others. She is a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
Levi Cain is a gay Black writer from Boston, MA. They are a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow, a former Sundress Academy of the Arts Fellow, and a three-time Best of the Net nominee. Their first chapbook, dogteeth., is available from Ursus Americanus Press.
Janine Certo is the author of five books, most recently, O Body of Bliss, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Contest in Poetry (Longleaf Press, 2022), and Elixir, winner of both the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (New American Press and Bordighera Press, 2021). A winner of Nimrod International Journal’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, recent poems appear in the Cincinnati Review and Poetry Northwest.
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman Fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook Bone House was published by Bull City Press. Her short story collection, Gods of Want, is forthcoming from One World, as well as a novel titled Organ Meats.
Taylor Clarke’s fiction appears in Southeast Review, Okay Donkey, and Grimoire. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and is currently at work on a novel. Find her on Twitter @taylormclarke.
Bailey Cohen-Vera cares about words. He is a Wiley Birkhofer Fellow in Poetry at NYU and the founder of Strange Tools, a writer’s workshop program.
Hannah Fischer is a librarian and nature enthusiast in Washington, D.C. She publishes the wildlife newsletter, WanderFinder, on a weekly-ish basis, and works of hers appear or are slated to appear in Calyx, the Bitter Oleander, and Joyland. She likes clapping on the down beat, and her views are hers alone.
Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a writer and poet from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Bessie has a MFA in Fiction from Virginia Tech and her work has appeared in Foglifter, HAD, [PANK], Palette, and elsewhere. Bessie's fiction chapbook, Rain Revolutions, is out now through Long Day Press.
Rosanna Nafziger Henderson’s writing appears in River Teeth, Gay Magazine, West Branch, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She grew up in both Virginias and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Karen Heuler ’s stories appear in over 120 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, as well as in a number of Best Of anthologies. Her fifth and sixth story collections (one on dementia and one on dark fantasy) and her fifth novel (an outrageous satire) will be coming out this year. She’s won an O. Henry Prize and various other awards and wouldn’t mind winning a few more.
Emily Holland (she/they) is a genderqueer lesbian writer living in Washington, DC. She received her MFA from American University. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including HAD, Black Warrior Review, Nat. Brut, DIALOGIST, and Homology Lit. Their work has been supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Currently, she is the Editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry magazine, and the incoming Chair of OutWrite, DC’s LGBTQ+ literary festival.
J.A. Holm is a queer poet from Southeastern Pennsylvania. His poems appear in Toho Journal and Impostor, as well as in his debut chapbook Self Self (Toho Publishing, 2021) and is also a recipient of one of the Cadigan Prizes for Younger Writers. He attended the Community College of Philadelphia and is a recent grad from Bucknell University.
Russell Janzen is a writer and dancer living in Brooklyn, NY. His written work appears in The Rumpus, Paper Brigade, and the New York Times.
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.
Stephen Kampa is the author of three collections of poems: Cracks in the Invisible, Bachelor Pad, and Articulate as Rain. His work appears in The Best American Poetry. Recently, he was the writer in residence at the Clampitt House in Lenox, MA. He teaches at Flagler College.
Sonya Lara received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. Currently, she is the Poetry Editor for Minerva Rising. She was accepted for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, and the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency and was shortlisted for the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Lit, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, the Los Angeles Review, the Acentos Review, and elsewhere.
Karin Lin-Greenberg is the author of the story collection Faulty Predictions, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her second story collection, Vanished, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize and will be published in September by the University of Nebraska Press. Her debut novel, You Are Here, will be published by Counterpoint in 2023. She has published another graphic narrative in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.
Jennifer Loyd is a poet and PhD student in West Texas. A former Stadler Fellow and editor for Copper Nickel, West Branch, and Sycamore Review, she also holds an MFA from Purdue University. Her poems and prose, which explore the intersection between private voice and public narratives, appear in the Southern Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
Kevin McIlvoy’s novel, One Kind Favor, has just been published by WTAW Press. For twenty-seven years he was editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in creative writing from 1987 to 2019, and as a Regents Professor of creative writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008.
Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of the Colored page (Sundress Publications, 2022), Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020) and Dust & Ashes (Californios Press, 2020). The editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, MEH’s poetry and prose appear or are forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Fahmidan Journal, The Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, New York Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Shenandoah, Solstice, and Zone 3. MEH’s an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. You can find him @MEHPoeting, writing and tweeting about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.
Andrei Molotiu is an artist and art historian living in Bloomington, Indiana. He is the author of Fragonard’s Allegory of Love and of Nautilus, a collection of abstract comics. He is also the editor of Abstract Comics: The Anthology. He is currently co-curating the exhibition Raw, Weirdo, and Beyond: American Alternative Comics, 1980-2000, which will open in September 2022 at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College.
Dev Murphy's writing and illustrations appear in the Cincinnati Review, The Guardian, Tarpaulin Sky, Pithead Chapel, DIAGRAM, The Rupture, and many others. Her chapbook I’m not I’m not I’m not a baby is forthcoming from Ethel in 2023. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @gytrashh. She lives in Pittsburgh with her cat, Nick.
Caleb Nolen grew up in Pennsylvania and Maryland. He completed his MFA at the University of Virginia and has received support from Blue Mountain Center and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he was a work-study scholar. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, FENCE, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in the Shenandoah Valley where he is working on his first book.
Shaina Phenix is a queer, Black femme poet, other-art-maker, educator from Harlem, NY. She holds an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech and is the 2021-2022 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work appears or is forthcoming in West Branch, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Foglifter, Salt Hill, The Pinch, Puerto del Sol, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, and CRAFT.
Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have been commissioned for projects in The Atlantic, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Katrina Roberts has published five collections of poems. Likeness, visual poems, is forthcoming in 2022. Her work’s been selected for The Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. Recent graphic poems and reviews appear in BOMB, Poetry Northwest, the Brooklyn Review, Thrush, the Indianapolis Review, Permafrost, the American Journal of Poetry, Iterant, Brink, Ilanot Review, Interim, and The Journal. She teaches, and curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College.
Jerrod Schwarz is the managing poetry editor of Driftwood Press. His poetry appears in VICE, Entropy, PANK, the New Republic, and others. His collection No Name Atkins was published by CLASH Books in 2020, and his most recent chapbook What the Barn Can’t Kill was published by Blasted Tree Publishing in 2021. You can find his art at @iambic_art on Instagram.
CJ Scruton is a trans, non-binary poet from the Lower Mississippi River Valley. They currently live on the Great Lakes, where they teach English and research ghost stories. Locally, they are a founding member and director of the Milwaukee Queer Writing Project and serve on the board of the Milwaukee Native American Literary Cooperative. Their work appears in The Journal, New South, Juked, CutBank, and other publications.
Bikram Sharma is from Bangalore. He completed an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and in 2016 he was the Charles Wallace India Trust Writing Fellow at the University of Kent. His work appears in various literary magazines including the Masters Review, Litro, and Atlas & Alice. In 2017 he won the DNA-Out of Print short fiction contest.
Aurora Shimshak grew up in several rural communities and small cities in Wisconsin. Her poetry and essays appear in the Southampton Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, and Spillway. An MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is at work on a memoir about forgiveness and a collection of poems.
Yvanna Vien Tica is a Filipina writer with a hearing impairment who grew up in Manila and a suburb near Chicago. A high school senior, her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Verse Daily, Poet Lore, and Salt Hill, among others, and has been performed virtually in a COP26 event. She reads for Muzzle Magazine and tweets @yvannavien. In her spare time, she can be found thanking God for another day.
Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). She has received fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and National Book Critics Circle. Her writing appears in Guernica, the American Poetry Review, Waxwing, AGNI, and elsewhere.
Jackie K. White is the author of three previous chapbooks and the co-author, with Simone Muench, of Hex & Howl (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). A former professor of English at Lewis University, her poems, translations, and collaborative poems have appeared in such journals as Third Coast, The Hopkins Review, and The Journal.
El Williams III’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ploughshares, River Styx, Vinyl Poetry & Prose, and elsewhere. Anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2022, he has received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Community of Writers, Tin House, and the Watering Hole. Currently, he is a dual MFA/MA candidate in poetry and African American & African diaspora studies at Indiana University.
Amy Woolard is a legal aid attorney working on civil rights policy & legislation in Virginia. Her debut poetry collection, Neck of the Woods, received the Alice James Award and was published in April 2020 by Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, & elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in publications such as Slate, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, The Rumpus, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
April Yee is a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow and the University of East Anglia’s Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholar. She reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK, where she serves on University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project and tweets at @aprilyee.
Tara Isabel Zambrano is a writer of color and the author of Death, Desire and Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by Okay Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Prize 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review 2018 Fineline Competition. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and The Best Micro Fiction 2019 and 2020 anthologies. She lives in Texas and is the fiction editor for Waxwing.