Contributors
Brother Anthony of Taizé (An Seon Jae) was born in Cornwall, United Kingdom in 1942. He has been living in Korea since 1980. He is now an emeritus professor at Sogang University and a chair-professor at Dankook University. A prolific translator, he has published some sixty volumes of translations of Korean literature, poetry, and fiction including poems by Sin Yong-mok and Jeong Ho-seung and novels by J. M. Lee and Lee Geum-yi. He took Korean nationality in 1994.
Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of the Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont.
Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is a Cave Canem Fellow and Affrilachian poet. She is the author of Conversion, What We Ask of Flesh, Starlight & Error, and Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up. Her next book, Room Swept Home, will be published by Wesleyan in February 2024. She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where she resides with her husband and children.
Tara Shea Burke is a queer poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She teaches writing and poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. She’s been an editor and contest judge, a board member and grants coordinator, is a functional, accessible strength trainer, and hustled in restaurants for twenty years. Her work appears in Khôra, Southern Humanities Review, and Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press, 2022).
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry for best collection. He lives in Fife.
Samuel Clark holds an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and is a 2021 participant in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for Spiritual Writing. His work appears in literary magazines such as BOOTH, Blood Orange Review, Gris-Gris Literary Journal, the Conium Review, Artemis Journal, and the anthology Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gaps in Literature & the Silences Around Us. He lives in Colorado with his adopted cat, Emily D.
Arianne Elena Payne is a Black writer, multidisciplinary creative, and aspiring historian from Chicago, Illinois. She has received the 2022 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Prize, the 2022 Virginia Downs Poetry Award, and the 2019 Frederick Hartmann Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in Voicemail Poems, TORCH, Shenandoah and is forthcoming in the Indiana Review and Hooligan Magazine. Situated in the complexities and lyricism of Blackness, girlhood, and geographies of resistance—her work strives to take Black people and their histories seriously.
Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol. Her poems appear in Boston Review, the Iowa Review, the New Republic, the New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, and the Times Literary Supplement, and her fifth collection, Grief’s Alphabet, will be published in April 2024. She has received grants from the Society of Authors and Arts Council England and also publishes short stories, essays, and reviews.
Blas Falconer is the author of four poetry collections, including Rara Avis (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2024), and a coeditor of two anthologies, The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, he teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University and has recently become the editor-in-chief for Poetry International Online.
Sylvia Gallagher is a literary translator of Japanese. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, she now resides in Fukushima.
Andy Gottschalk is a writer and artist from Kansas, living in New York. His films have been exhibited at the Yale Student Film Festival and GIPHY Film Festival. His prose appears or is forthcoming in Rougarou, Sage Cigarettes, and Post Road, among others.
Morgan Hamill is a graduate fellow at Penn State-University Park. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere.
Cynthia Hogue’s tenth poetry collection is instead, it is dark (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her ekphrastic Covid chapbook is entitled Contain (Tram Editions, 2022), and her new collaborative translation from the French of Nicole Brossard is Distantly (Omnidawn, 2022). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, two NEA Fellowships, and the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. She served as Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day for September (2022), sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Hogue was the inaugural Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Tucson.
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.
Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong is from Oregon and lives in New York. Her work appears in the Columbia Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and Maudlin House, among others. Find her on Instagram @youngeuhnn.
Angie Kang is a Chinese-American writer and illustrator living in the California bay area. Her work appears in The Believer, Catapult, The Rumpus, Narrative, The Offing, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She has received support from Tin House, VONA/Voices, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Sundress Academy of the Arts. More of her work can be found on Twitter/Instagram @anqiekanq.
Karan Kapoor is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. A finalist for the Diode, Tusculum Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review chapbook prizes, their poems appear in AGNI, Colorado Review, the Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and elsewhere, fiction in Joyland and the other side of hope, and translations in The Offing and the Los Angeles Review. They're the Editor-in-Chief of ONLY POEMS.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, PhD, emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six. She is author of three poetry collections: 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), and The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019). Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, Ploughshares, and Brevity, among others. Julia is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.
Allison Lee is a second-year law student at the University of Houston. Her poetry and fiction appear in Unbroken and HCE Review. After she graduates, she plans on becoming a government or public interest attorney.
Blake Levario lives in Brooklyn and collects Snoopy tattoos.
Amy Lee Lillard is the author of Exile in Guyville, winner of the 2022 BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize; A Grotesque Animal from University of Iowa Press; and Dig Me Out from Atelier26 Books. Her fiction and nonfiction appear in Vox, LitHub, Barrelhouse, Foglifter, Epiphany, Off Assignment, Autostraddle, and more. She is the co-creator of Broads and Books Productions, home of the Fuzzy Memories podcast, the Wyrd Woman audio drama, and more coming soon.
Maria Martinez is a Latinx poet and perpetual student living in El Paso, Texas. “In the Waiting Room of the County Jail” is her debuting piece.
Librarian, mother, and minor trickster, Janna Miller is published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, Whale Road Review, Necessary Fiction, Best Microfiction 2023, and others. Her story collection, All Lovers Burn at the End of the World, is forthcoming from SLJ Editions in 2024. Generally, if the toaster blows up, it is not her fault.
Nicole Montana is a recipient of a Ricardo Salinas Scholarship for her participation in Aspen Words Summer Words 2022 Program. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board 2020 Artist Initiative Grant for her work-in-progress “Stay Where I Can See You.” Her creative nonfiction appears in The Spectacle. Montana serves on the Board of Directors for Green Card Voices, a multimedia storytelling organization dedicated to immigrant voices. She currently teaches writing at the University of Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
Leila Christine Nadir is an Afghan-American artist and writer whose work appears in literary and scholarly journals, in museums and galleries, and in forests, classrooms, and kitchens. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Khôra, Black Warrior Review, North American Review, ASAP, and Aster(ix), and has been supported by awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the de Groot Foundation, and Aspen Words. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is founding director of the Environmental Humanities Program at an upstate New York university. More info: www.leila.xyz. Instagram: @afghan_vegan.
Andrew Navarro is a Mexican-American poet who lives in Southern California. He received his MFA from the University of California Riverside's Low-Residency Program, and works as a history teacher in the Inland Empire. His work appears in ZYZZYVA, Poet Lore, Air/Light, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife and two daughters.
Manini Nayar’s stories and articles appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, London Magazine, Boston Review, Stand, Words and Images, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and other publications. She was awarded individual artist fellowships in fiction from the Pennsylvania and Indiana Arts Councils, and has won the BBC World Service Short Story Competition (co-winner), the Chelsea Award in Short Fiction, and Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Story Award. Her collection of short fiction was recently a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. She lives in State College, Pennsylvania, and teaches English and women’s studies at Penn State.
Hiroko Oyamada was born in Hiroshima in 1983. Her debut novella The Factory won the Shincho Prize for New Writers in 2010, and in 2013 she was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novella The Hole. Her other writing includes several collections of short stories and essays.
jj peña (he/they) is a queer, burrito-blooded writer. jj has won a few creative nonfiction flash/hybrid contests, from Fractured Literature (2021), Tinderbox Journal (2021), Santa Clara Review (2021), Mythic Picnic (2020), CutBank (2019), and Blue Earth Review (2019). jj's work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2020, & Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions (2020). jj serves as a flash fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine.
Robert James Russell is the author of the forthcoming graphic memoir Hard Body: A Personal History of My Form on Display (Simon & Schuster, 2025). He is the founding editor of the literary journal CHEAP POP. His illustrations and writing appear in print and online at NPR, The Rumpus, The Offing, Gulf Coast, New South, and Passages North, among others. A native of Michigan, Robert lives and works in Lincoln, Nebraska. You can find him on Twitter/Instagram at @robhollywood.
Yeom Seungsuk, novelist and literary critic, was born in Seoul in 1982. She made her debut in 2005 with the short story “Snake Tailed King Rat,” which won the Contemporary Literature Newcomer Prize, and in 2017, her review No Future and the Speed of the Excavator: Criticism on Time of A City by Park Sol-moe was selected for the Kyunghyang Newspaper’s New Young Writers Prize. Her other works include Chaplin, Chaplin, Nowhere Man, And the Things Left Behind, The World is Unreadably Beautiful, and the full-length novels Some Countries Are Too Big (The Bingo World) and Let’s Not Be Here.
Tracy Sierra was born and raised in the Colorado mountains. She is an attorney who currently lives in New England in an antique colonial-era home. When not writing, she spends time with her husband and two children. Her debut novel, Nightwatching, will be published by Pamela Dorman Books/Viking in February 2024.
Cosima Smith is a creative exploring life through multiple media including writing, visual art, and body work. Striving to be in conversation with nature (including people and their creations), time, and the body, you can find Smith hiking, practicing or teaching yoga, or by locating the nearest body of water. Works from Smith can be found in Fahmidan Journal, Full House Literary, The Edge of Sex from Routledge, and across the web.
Dorsía Smith Silva is a poetry editor of The Hopper and professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. She is also the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering and coeditor of seven books. Her recent poems appear in several journals, including Denver Quarterly, Cream City Review, and Fourteen Hills. CavanKerry will publish her poetry book in 2024 and she posts @DSmithSilva.
Cherry Lou Sy is a writer and playwright originally from the Philippines and now based in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU will be published by the Dutton imprint of Penguin Random House in the fall of 2024.
Theresa Sylvester is a Zambian writer based in Western Australia. She is a 2023 Faber Writing Academy Scholarship recipient (Allen & Unwin Australia). In 2022, she won the Quarterly West Prose Contest and the Black Fox Writing Contest. Her stories appear in Black Warrior Review, midnight & indigo, and in Australia’s Rockingham Writers Centre anthology.
Chris Vanjonack’s fiction and creative nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in One Story, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he writes and teaches at the Ohio State University as a Post-MFA Scholar. Find him on Twitter @chrisvanjonack.
Salonee Verma is a Jharkhandi-American writer, student, and the co-founder of antinarrative (@antinarrativeZ), a collaborative zine. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Asian American Writers' Workshop, Gasher Press, Shenandoah, Backslash Lit, VIBE, and more. He has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net, as well as the American Voices Award.
Paul Wackers was born in 1978 in New Haven, Connecticut, and he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The New York–based artist is first of all concerned with figurative painting, which he tends to slightly abstract. Paul's pictures are engaged in non-places, vegetable landscapes with bookshelves and window ledges, offering an insight into a parallel reality. Deserted spaces reflect an inner perception and remind the beholder of the still lifes by the well-known Dutch classicists such as Willem van Aelst. The regular order of the objects seems to be maintained by the image. Cans, candleholders, and empty vases fill up the interior. But at a second glance, straight and twisty lines disturb the familiar impression. Formally, the geometrical aspects of the composition subsist side by side with the organic elements. The traces of individual interpretation become visible on the plane canvas and on the wooden panel. By this means, the obscure inner impressions melt into the existing phenomena.
Eric Wang (he/him) is a poet residing in Scarborough, Canada. His work appears in Guernica, Best Canadian Poetry 2023, and elsewhere.
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.