Contributors

Quinn Adikes’s work appears or is forthcoming in Five Points, Epiphany, december, the Southampton Review, Fiction International, and other journals. He is the recipient of the Joseph Kelly Prize for Writing and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn and has an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton, where he also taught creative writing. He is writing a novel.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press) and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer, and she also teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop.

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.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of a chapbook and three full-length books of poetry, including Mom in Space (forthcoming 2024) and Romances (2020), both with LSU Press. Her poems and essays appear in journals such as 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Image, and the Southern Review. She is the managing editor of the Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, the Georgia Review, Rattle, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, the Florida Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press). In 2018, Atefat-Peckham was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet. His work appears in the anthology My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). Atefat-Peckham lives in Huntington, West Virginia and currently studies English and near eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard.

Ned Balbo’s books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize), 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Donald Justice Prize and the Poets’ Prize). He has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (translation) and the Maryland Arts Council (poetry). In July 2021 he was a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

John Bargowski’s new book is American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His first book Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, selected by Paul Mariani for the Bordighera Prize, appeared in 2012. His poems also appear on Poetry Daily and in the Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among others.

Destiny O. Birdsong is the author of the poetry collection, Negotiations (Tin House Books, 2020), which was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award, and the triptych novel Nobody’s Magic (Grand Central, 2022), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She was the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark and now serves as a 2022–23 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Richard Bohannon, a cartographer and sociologist who plays around with maps to tell stories, is Associate Professor of Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies at Metro State University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Despy Boutris’s writing appears in Copper Nickel, Guernica, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Agni, the American Poetry Review, the Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of the West Review.

Akhim Yuseff Cabey is a Pushcart Prize-winning black author whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, the Florida Review, Rhino, Passages North, Salamander, the Minnesota Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Originally from the Bronx, New York, he now lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Mandana Chaffa is founder and editor-in-chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, a finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’s Best Magazine/Debut; and an editor-at-large at Chicago Review of Books. Her writing appears in a wide array of publications and anthologies, and she serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and is president of The Flow Chart Foundation. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.

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.

Doris W. Cheng is an immigrant Taiwanese American writer. She is the author of a fiction chapbook Earthling (Word West Press, 2021), and her short stories and essays appear in New Orleans Review, Witness, Berkeley Fiction Review, the Normal School, the Cincinnati Review, and other literary magazines. She received an MA in English literature from Columbia University and is an alumna of Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Tin House Workshops.

K Chiucarello is a writer, editor, and tutor living in the Hudson Valley. They edit over at Conjunctions, and tutor in the carceral system on behalf of Bard Prison Initiative.

Chris Crowder is from Flint, Michigan and earned his MFA at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. A poetry editor for the Adroit Journal, his poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, Witness, Jellyfish Review, Zone 3, and the Poetry Foundation’s VS podcast.

Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of seven books. His latest collection of poetry, The Diaspora Sonnets, will be published by Liveright Press (2023). He is a founding member of Kundiman, and he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Lillian Giles is a Black Queer writer and educator living in Oakland, California. She holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Lillian is finishing a novel that is based on her great grandmother’s life as a midwife and defender of the 1940s Black Queer community. It’s fiction but those stated parts are true. Her lyrical essay, “Dear Daughters” has been published in The Rumpus. She’s been awarded the Joe Brainard Writing Fellowship in fiction, won the Nomadic Press Award in fiction, and was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in poetry.

E. Gonzalez spent her childhood on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border, daydreaming about magic, faraway places, and what-ifs. She holds a BA in politics and romance languages from NYU. You can find her writing in a café somewhere in the world.

Jodie Hollander’s work appears in journals such as the Poetry Review, the Yale Review, PN Review, the Kenyon Review, Poetry London, the Hudson Review, the Dark Horse, the New Criterion, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The Best Australian Poems of 2011, and The Best Australian Poems of 2015. Her debut full-length collection, My Dark Horses, was published with Liverpool University Press & Oxford University Press. Her second collection, Nocturne, will be published with the Liverpool & Oxford University Press in the spring of 2023. She currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Ann Hudson is the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press) and Glow (Next Page Press), a chapbook on radium. Her poems appear in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor for RHINO Poetry.

Mahak Jain’s fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, The Journey Prize Stories 28: The Best of Canada’s New Writers, and elsewhere. She also writes children’s books, most recently Bharatanatyam in Ballet Shoes, illustrated by Anu Chouhan.

Ryan Matthew Jones is a recent graduate of San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing Program. His writing explores speculative fiction and its place in the Black and LGBTQ communities. He hopes to make the genre more approachable for people who have felt excluded like himself.

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke lives in Florida where she edits confidential documents. Her work appears in New Ohio Review, the Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Salamander. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press. She serves as a reader for The Dodge.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her latest poetry collections include America that island off the coast of France, winner of the Dorset Prize, and the bilingual Spanish–English La crisis es el cuerpo / The Crisis is The Body, published in Argentina by Editorial Bajo la luna. Her latest poetry book, I Want to Tell You, will be published in spring 2023 by University of Pittsburgh Press.

Josh Luckenbach’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, Nimrod, Birmingham Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas and a BA from the University of Virginia. He lives in West Texas where, in addition to pursuing his PhD, he serves as managing editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Sijia Ma is a visual artist based in the United States and Shanghai. She is currently pursuing a BA in art and economics at Smith College. Sijia has worked to develop image-based projects and used the language of photography to explore the complexity of today’s Chinese fantasy and reality in a subtler way.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows was born in Virginia and raised in West Virginia to a family of English, German, and Cherokee descent. He has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, and National Association for Interpretation. Past Shenandoah contributor and the author of In the Hands of the River (Hub City Press, 2022), Lucien is currently a PhD candidate, volunteer ranger assistant, and ultramarathon runner in northern Colorado.

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize; House of Sugar, House of Stone; and two chapbooks. She coedited the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo Fellow and Ledbury Critic, she’s received support from Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, The Community of Writers, and others. She teaches high school in Denver, where she lives with her family.

Kathleen Radigan is a poet and cartoonist from Rhode Island. Her work appears in the New Yorker, Guernica, The Sun, The Rumpus, and The Baffler, among other places. She currently teaches high school English in New York City.

Esteban Ramón Pérez received his BFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts, and his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University School of Art. Pérez lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Pérez’s practice utilizes his experience as a professional upholsterer and intertwines cultural and artistic sensibilities of his Chicano heritage with the visual language of postmodernism as well as issues rooted in postcolonial history. His work embodies facets of art histories, subjectivity, spirituality, and social issues.

Eduardo Roldan is a Latino writer from California with roots in Mexico and Guatemala. He graduated with an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and works within the alchemy of magical realism. He is fascinated in the space between the sublime, mystical, and mundane, and his writing explores cultural enlightenment and identity.

Matthue Roth’s chapbook Somehow I Have Built a Nest was published last summer by Ghost City Press. His stories appear in Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and Tin House, and were shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Brooklyn with his four daughters. By day, he’s a writer at Google, and he keeps a secret diary here.

Jane Satterfield’s new book, The Badass Brontës, is a winner of the Diode Editions Book Prize and will appear in 2023. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in poetry, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. Recent poetry and essays appear in The Common, Ecotone, Orion, Literary Matters, Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore.

Leona Sevick is the Press 53 Award for Poetry winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, and the Southern Review. She was a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She serves as advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and is Professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature.

David Sheskin is a writer and artist whose work appears in the Dalhousie Review, Puerto del Sol, The Satirist, and Notre Dame Review. His art has been published in numerous magazines as well as within the format of calendars, prints, jigsaw puzzles, and note cards. His most recent book is David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Sarah J. Sloat is the author of Hotel Almighty, a collection a visual poetry published in 2020 by Sarabande Books. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived for many years in Europe, where she works in news. Her poems, prose, and collage appear in New Delta Review, Diagram, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. You can keep up with her on Twitter at @SJSloat and on Instagram at @sjane30. Erasures sourced from: Roughead, William. Classic Crimes. NYRB Classics, 2000.

Caroline Tracey is a journalist and essayist whose work focuses on the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. Her essays appear in the Kenyon Review online, New South, and elsewhere. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is the Climate Justice Fellow at the High Country News. Her manuscript-in-progress, Salt Lakes, won the 2022 Waterston Desert Writing Prize.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of assorted collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including the forthcoming Meditation 40: The Honesty Room (Pank Books, 2023) and Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2023). A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, she teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.

Ann Wilberton is a queer poet and librarian living in Rhode Island. She’s interested in writing about queer joy, memory/forgetting, invisible disability, and aging. She is enrolled in the MFA program at UMass Boston. Her work can also be found in Rattle, Maine Review, and Critical Read.