ISSUE THIRTEEN: FAMILY GATHERING

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

HUMBERTO AK’ABAL (1952–2019) was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1993 his book Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named Book of the Year by Association of Guatemalan Journalists and received their Golden Quetzal award. In 2004, he declined the Guatemala National Prize in Literature. His poems appear in English translation in If Today Were Tomorrow (Milkweed, 2024).

JOSÉ A. ALCÁNTARA is the author of The Bitten World: Poems (Tebot Bach, 2021). His poetry has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, and The Southern Review. He lives in western Colorado.

TALVIKKI ANSEL is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Somewhere in Space (The Ohio State University Press / The Journal Award in Poetry).

LUCI ARBUS-SCANDIFFIO is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, Columbia Journal, and Denver Quarterly. She has two lesbian moms and is originally from New Jersey.

JENNIFER ATKINSON is the author of six collections of poetry—most recently A Gray Realm the Ocean (Fordham University Press, 2022). She lives in northern Virginia, and is newly retired from George Mason University, where she taught in the MFA and BFA programs in Poetry Writing.

ANGELA BALL teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She lives in Hattiesburg with her two dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.

RICK BAROT’s most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones (Milkweed Editions, 2024). His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Adroit Journal, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Poetry. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and Stanford University, he lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. 

MICHAEL BAZZETT is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Echo Chamber (Milkweed, 2021). His work has appeared in Granta, The Nation, The Paris Review,  Ploughshares, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review. His verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), was longlisted for the National Translation Award and named one of 2018’s best books of poetry by The New York Times. His is the translator of If Today Were Tomorrow (Milkweed, 2024), Humberto Ak’abal’s selected poems.

MARA BENEWAY is a writer, visual artist, and teacher from New York. Her poems have appeared in Bodega Magazine, The Bread Loaf Journal, and Foglifter. She is currently in grad school, studying creative writing at the University of South Florida and English literature at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. 

ERIC TYLER BENICK wrote the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) and Memory Field; A Travelogue of Forgetting (Long Day, 2024). With Nick Rossi, he is a founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His more recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Afternoon Visitor, Brooklyn Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Meridian, NOIR SAUNA, and Puerto Del Sol. He lives in Brooklyn.

RACHEL BETESH tends to a wild and fertile garden, and works as a women’s health nurse in Philadelphia. Her poetry has been featured in Brink, Denver Quarterly, The New Yorker, and Poetry Northwest.

SARAH BOXER is the author of In the Floyd Archives (Pantheon, 2001), a graphic novel centering on Freud’s case histories, and its sequel, Mother May I? (Ipbooks, 2019), based on the child psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott. She also created two Shakespearean tragic-comics, Hamlet: Prince of Pigs and Anchovius Caesar: The Decomposition of a Romaine ​Salad. Boxer edited the anthology Ultimate Blogs, and her essays and criticism appear in Artforum, The Atlantic, The Best American Comics Criticism, Bookforum, The Comics Journal, The MAD Files, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. She is now working on My Model, My Self, a book of drawings and essays.

STEPHANIE BURT is the author of multiple books of poetry and criticism, most recently We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022). She also co-hosts a podcast about superhero games, Team-Up Moves. She teaches at Harvard.

LAUREN CAMP serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A former astronomer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park, Camp is a recipient of the Dorset Prize, finalist commendations from the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

STACIE CASSARINO is the author, most recently, of Each Luminous Thing (Persea, 2023), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and recommended by the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book Club. Her previous collection, Zero at the Bone (New Issues, 2009), received a Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award. She is also a recipient of the 92Y “Discovery”/The Nation prize and the author of a scholarly monograph, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Ohio State, 2018). She lives in Vermont with her three daughters.

STEPHANIE CAWLEY is a poet in Philadelphia, a 2023 NEA Fellow, and the author of My Heart But Not My Heart, selected by Solmaz Sharif for the Slope Book Prize. Poems and other writing appear in Prolit, Protean, TYPO, and West Branch.

MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN obtained an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a PhD from the University of Adelaide, where they received the 2021 Doctoral Research Medal. Their most recent poetry book is Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (Giramondo, 2021). New work appears in Australian Poetry Journal, The Common, The Georgia Review, and The Kenyon Review. A former Fellow of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Cayanan lives in Angeles City in the Philippines, and currently teaches at the University of the Philippines Diliman.  

MRB CHELKO is the author of Manhattations, selected by Mary Ruefle for the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her recent work can be found in Iterant, Missouri Review, Paperbag, Sixth Finch, and Thrush.

SUMAN CHHABRA is the author of Demons Off (Meekling Press, 2015). Her work has been supported by Kundiman, The Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Chicago Reader, The Georgia Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She teaches courses on contemporary Asian American literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

JAMES CIANO holds an MFA from New York University. Originally from New York, he lives in Los Angeles, California, where he is a Provost Fellow and PhD Candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.

DARIN CICCOTELLI is a 2017 NEA Fellow. His poems appear Antioch Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Subtropics. He teaches at Soka University of America.

RIVKA CLIFTON is the transfemme author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) as well as the chapbooks MOT and Agape (Osmanthus Press). She has work in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Guernica, The Offing, and Pleiades.

NAN COHEN is the author, most recently, of Unfinished City (Gunpowder Press, 2017) and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a Literature Fellowship from the NEA, she codirects the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference poetry programs and lives in Los Angeles.

LAURA CRONK is the author, most recently, of Ghost Hour (Persea, 2020). Her work has appeared in Court Green, Iterant, LitHub, and several editions of Best American Poetry. She is an assistant professor of writing at The New School.

JULIE DANHO is the author of Those Who Keep Arriving, winner of the 2018 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. Her chapbook Six Portraits received the 2013 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award, and her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily.

WILLIAM VIRGIL DAVIS is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New (Texas Review Press, 2015). His first, One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

JULIÁN DELACRUZ holds an MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University. Originally from New Jersey, he lives and teaches in Los Angeles.

ANNIE DELMEDICO has had her work appear in Sundog Magazine, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and Wigleaf’s 2024 Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and lives in San Francisco.

SALLY DEWIND is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. She is an MFA student at Brooklyn College, where she is the recipient of the 2024 Lainoff Prize. Her work can be found in The Other Almanac.  

CHELSEA DINGMAN is the author of Thaw (Georgia, 2017) and through a small ghost (Georgia, 2020). Her third collection is I, Divided (Louisiana State, 2023). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta.

STEPHANIE YUE DUHEM is a 1.5-generation Chinese-American poet and a graduate of the New Writers Project at UT-Austin. She was a 2020 Best of the Net nominee and a 2021 and 2023 Pushcart nominee. Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Iterant, and Southern Humanities Review.

ERICA EHRENBERG has had her work appear in BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry, she is currently in training to become a psychoanalyst.

CAROLINE FALZONE is a poet living in New York. Her work has appeared in The Little Jackie Paper and Narrative.

ROBERT FERNANDEZ is the author of Scarecrow (Wesleyan, 2016), Pink Reef (Canarium, 2013), and We Are Pharaoh (Canarium, 2011). He is also the co-translator of a selection of Stéphane Mallarmé’s work, Azure (Wesleyan, 2015). His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Huizache, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, Transition, and The Yale Review.

JENNIFER FRANKLIN is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize and the 2023 Julie Suk Award. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a NYFA/City Artist Corps grant, and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Poems from her new manuscript, A Fire in Her Brain, appear in American Poetry Review, The Common, Poetry Northwest, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. With Nicole Callihan and Pichchenda Bao, she coedited the anthology Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). She teaches in the Manhattanville College MFA Program, for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as program director. 

GABRIEL FRIED is the author of two collections of poetry, The Children Are Reading (Four Way, 2017) and Making the New Lamb Take (Four Way, 2007). He edits poetry for Persea Books and directs the creative writing program at the University of Missouri.

TRACY FUAD is the author of PORTAL (Chicago, 2024) and about:blank (Pittsburgh, 2021), winner of the Donald Hall Prize and a National Poetry Series finalist. A graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and a 2021-22 Poetry Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, she lives with her family in Berlin, where she teaches at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. 

ASHA FUTTERMAN is a poet and an actor from Chicago. Her chapbook, song of gray, is forthcoming from The Song Cave. Her poems appear in ANNLY, Conduit, Interim Poetics, and The Journal. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis.

GAVIN YUAN GAO is the author of the poetry collection At the Altar of Touch (University of Queensland Press, 2022) and a James A. Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.

PAUL GIBBONS lives in the San Joaquin Valley in California. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Los Angeles Review, and Willow Springs.

STEPHEN GIBSON is the author of Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (Able Muse, 2024), Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (Arkansas, 2017), The Garden of Earthly Delights: Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press, 2015), Rorschach Art Too (Story Line Press), and four other books.

JAKE GOLDWASSER is a poet and cartoonist from the Hudson Valley. His work has appeared in the New England Review, The New Yorker, and Oxford Poetry. He lives in Iowa City, where he is pursuing MFAs in poetry and literary translation at the University of Iowa.

STEFANIA GOMEZ received her MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. She has received fellowships from the Dirt Palace, Lambda Literary, the International Quilt Museum, and Sewanee Writers Workshop. She is a 2023-2024 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship semifinalist and a 2023 Fulbright Research Fellow. Her manuscript, REDWORK, has been a semifinalist for the Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the OSU/The Journal Wheeler Prize, the Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize, the Four Way Books Levis Prize, the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize, and the National Poetry Series.

GILES GOODLAND is the author of Of Discourse (Grand Iota 2023), Civil Twilight (Parlor Press, 2022), A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001), Capital (Salt, 2006), and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). He has worked as a lexicographer and editor, teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, and lives in West London.

DAVID GORIN is the author of To a Distant Country, selected by Jennifer Chang for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. His writing received the 2023 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America and has been supported by MacDowell and Millay Arts. In recent years he has taught at the Pratt Institute, Deep Springs College, the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution (via the Yale Prison Education Initiative), Eastern Correctional Facility (via the Bard Prison Initiative), and Yale. He lives in San Francisco, where he curates the WAVEMACHINE poetry and performance series.

DAN GUTSTEIN is the author of eight books and chapbooks, including, most recently, Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). He was vocalist for the hard-charging and mildly-charting 2022 post-punk album States of America.

HEATHER HAMILTON’s chapbook, Here is a Clearing, was published by the Poetry Society of America. She teaches at Penn State Harrisburg, and her poems have appeared most recently in Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and Poetry Northwest.

JENNIFER HASEGAWA is the author of La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, longlisted for The Believer Book Award for Poetry. She has won the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award, and her poetry has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, jubilat, Tule Review, and Vallum. Founder of the Kau Kau Chronicles, a website dedicated to preserving and sharing recipes from out-of-print cookbooks published by Hawai‘i community organizations in the early- to mid-20th century, she was born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi and lives in San Francisco.

KATHLEEN HEIL is the author of You Can Have it All (Moist Books, 2024) and the translator of The Loveliest Vowel Empties, Meret Oppenheim’s collected poems (World Poetry Books, 2023). Her work appears in The Common, The New Yorker, and The Stinging Fly.

STEFANIA HEIM is author of the poetry collections Hour Book (Ahsahta, 2019) and A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback, 2014). Her translations include Geometry of Shadows: Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian Poems (A Public Space, 2019) and de Chirico’s posthumous novel, Mr. Dudron. She lives in Bellingham, and is associate professor at Western Washington University.

JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025), and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He teaches at UC-Riverside, online at Hugo House, the Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and at The Writer’s Center.  

JOHN HODGEN is Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and advisory editor for New Letters at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Hodgen won the AWP Prize in Poetry for Grace (Pittsburgh, 2005). His new book is What We May Be (Lynx House, 2024).

MICHAEL HURLEY is from Pittsburgh. His work appears in Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Guernica, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Sugar House Review, and the chapbook Wooden Boys (Seven Kitchens Press, 2014).

BRIAN JOHNSON is the author of Torch Lake and Other Poems (Web del Sol, 2008) and Site Visits, a collaboration with the German painter Burghard Müller-Dannhausen. His work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.

MATTHEW KLANE has an MA in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His books include Hist (w/ James Belflower, Calamari 2022), Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flimb Press 2016), Che (Stockport Flats 2013), and B (Stockport Flats 2008). An e-chapbook, from Of the Day, is at Delete Press, and an e-book, My, is at Fence Digital. He is cofounder of Film Forum Press and currently co-curator of Salon Salvage, a poetry and performance series inside of Weathered Wood in downtown Troy, New York.

ISH KLEIN is the author of four poetry books, most recently The New Sun Time (Canarium, 2020). She also authored the plays The Orchids, Drummer 41, “In A Word, Faust,” The Dee Men, and The Restless Leg. Her poems have appeared on the Poetry Foundation website, in Fence, and in Oversound. She is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theater (CRVPT) and Anthology Poets Theatre. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she produces and hosts the podcast “Wrestling with Poetry,” which is about pro wrestling and poetry.

ANDREW KOCH lives in Nashville. His work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Arkansas International, Five Points, and Ploughshares. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize for emerging writers and holds a PhD in English from the University of North Texas.

WAYNE KOESTENBAUM is a poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, and filmmaker who has published over twenty books, including Stubble Archipelago, Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH is the author of Valuing (Georgia, 2019), a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013). Recent poems appear in Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review.

KEETJE KUIPERS is the author, most recently, of All Its Charms, which includes poems featured in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry. She has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her fourth book will be Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA, 2025).

SARAH LAO is a Chinese American writer. Her poetry can be found in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, and Narrative. She is currently studying at Harvard College.

SYDNEY LEA is a former Pulitzer Prize finalist who was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. His fifteenth book of poems is What Shines? (Four Way, 2023). In 2021, he was presented with Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

ANNA LEAHY is the author of What Happened Was:, Aperture, and Tumor. Her work has appeared in Aeon, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Poetry, Scientific American, and The Southern Review; and her essays have won awards from Dogwood, Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, and Ninth Letter. She edits the international Tab Journal and has been a fellow at MacDowell and the American Library in Paris.

PETER LEIGHT lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Matter, New World, Paris Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.

LESLE LEWIS is author of five collections, most recently Rainy Days on the Farm (Fence, 2019). She lives in New Hampshire.

WILLIE LIN lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. A Kundiman fellow, she is the author of Conversation Among Stones (BOA Editions, 2023).

DEIRDRE LOCKWOOD lives in Seattle and is working on a novel. Her debut collection of poems is An Introduction to Error (Cornerstone, 2025). Her work also appears in Poetry Northwest, Threepenny Review, and Yale Review.

JOANNA LULOFF is the author of the novel Remind Me Again What Happened (Algonquin, 2018) and the short story collection The Beach at Galle Road (Algonquin, 2012). Her individual stories and essays appear in The Cincinnati Review, Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, and Western Humanities Review. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, VCCA, Willapa Bay AiR, and The Mineral School. She received her MFA from Emerson College and her PhD from the University of Missouri. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is co-editor of the literary journal Copper Nickel.

ALESSANDRA LYNCH serves as poet in residence at Butler University. Her fourth book is Pretty Tripwire (Alice James, 2021). Her poems have recently appeared in The Florida Review, Guesthouse, and Kenyon Review.

RACHEL LYON is author of the novels Self-Portrait with Boy (Scribner, 2018), a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize; and Fruit of the Dead (Scribner, 2024), named a most anticipated book by Elle, Oprah Daily, and People. Rachel’s short fiction appears in Catapult, One Story, and The Rumpus. Shel lives with her husband and children in Western Massachusetts, where she cohosts the Dream Away Reading Series, and was recently appointed the 2024 Paris Writer in Residence, a position cosponsored by the Paris School of Arts and Culture, the American University of Paris, and the Centre Culturel Irlandais.

CAROLANN CAVIGLIA MADDEN has work in Beloit Poetry Journal, Interim, PANK, The Stinging Fly, and World Literature Today. Her upcoming book, Ritual Loss, was selected by Desirée Alvarez for Omnidawn’s First/Second Poetry Book Contest. A recent winner of the Verlaine Prize for Poetry judged by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, she is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

ANGELO MAO is a biomedical scientist and writer. His first book of poems is Abattoir (Burnside Review Press, 2021). His poetry and reviews have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Georgia Review, Lana Turner, and Poetry. He is also a poetry editor for DIALOGIST.

RADHA MARCUM is the author of two collections. Bloodline received the 2018 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award in Poetry and Pine Soot Tendon Bone (Word Works, 2024) won the Washington Prize. She lives in Colorado, where she writes the Poet to Poet newsletter and teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

CORINNE WOHLFORD MASON teaches American studies and chairs the women’s and gender studies program at Saint Louis University. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University and a PhD in American studies from Saint Louis University. Her poems have been published in the Grolier Poetry Prize Annual, Harvard Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, New Ohio Review, Phoebe, and Pleaides.

MARTHA MCCOLLOUGH is the author of Wolf Hat Iron Shoes (Lily Poetry Review Books 2022) and the chapbook Grandmother Mountain (Blue Lyra 2019). Her poems appear in Bear Review, The Boiler, Pleiades, and Radar Poetry. Originally from Detroit, she lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

BECKA MARA MCKAY is a poet and a translator of Hebrew literature. She directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University, where she serves as faculty advisor to Swamp Ape Review. Her newest book of poems is The Little Book of No Consolation (Barrow Street, 2021).

DOUGLAS W. MILLIKEN is a queer composer, artist, and writer based in Saco, Maine. The author of several books—most recently the novel Enclosure Architect (West Virginia University Press, 2024) and the experimental family history Any Less You—he is also a founding member of the post-jazz chamber septet The Plaster Cramp. His honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Glimmer Train, and RA & Pin Drop Studios.

TRAVIS MOSSOTTI lives in St. Louis and works for Washington University. His fourth collection, Racecar Jesus (BSPG, 2023), won the Christopher Smart-Joan Alice Prize in the UK (BSPG, 2023), and his fifth, Apocryphal Genesis (Saturnalia, 2024), won the Alma Book Award.

ALICIA MOUNTAIN is the author of Four in Hand (BOA, 2023). Her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has been published by the Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poetry Northwest. Mountain serves on the board of Foglifter, a LGBTQIA+ journal in the Bay Area, and is in psychoanalytic training at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. She lives in New York City and teaches at the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn. 

BENJAMIN NIESPODZIANY is a Chicago-based writer whose work appears in the Wigleaf Top 50, Booth, Conduit, Indiana Review, Puerto del Sol, and Sixth Finch. His debut poetry collection is No Farther than the End of the Street (Okay Donkey, 2022), and his new novella of connected stage plays is Cardboard Clouds (X-R-A-Y, 2023).

JUSTIN NOGA is a writer from Akron, Ohio, whose work appears in The Arkansas International, Booth, Columbia Journal, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review, Northwest Review, Reed Magazine, and Witness. He has received residencies from Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. He is forever grateful for the ass-saving grant from Artist Relief during the worst of Covid.

MIHO NONAKA is a bilingual poet from Tokyo. She is the author of The Museum of Small Bones (Ashland Poetry Press, 2020) and the Japanese translator of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (KADOKAWA, 2021). She teaches creative writing at Wheaton College. 

BRIDGET O’BERNSTEIN is a poet from Brooklyn with an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University. In 2022, she won the Perkoff Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Iowa Review, and New Ohio Review.  Her manuscript Several American Flowers won the 2022 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship.

DEIRDRE O’CONNOR is the author of two books of poems, including The Cupped Field, which received the 2018 Able Muse Book Award. Her work appears in The Fourth River, On the Seawall, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She lives in central Pennsylvania and directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University.

KATE O’DONOGHUE is a writer from Long Island. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Purdue University. Her criticism and poetry appear in DIAGRAM, Grist, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and The Rumpus.

GENEVIEVE PAYNE has an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was the 2019 recipient of the Leonard Brown Prize in poetry. Recent work appears in The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Nashville Review, and RHINO.

CATE PEEBLES is the author of The Haunting (Tupelo Press, 2024) and Thicket (Lost Roads Press, 2018), and several chapbooks, including Sun King (Factory Hollow) and The Woodlands (Sixth Finch Books). Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Bayou, DIAGRAM, diode, Ploughshares, and Volt. She is coeditor of the poetry magazine Fou.

GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT is the David Feinson Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Columbia University. His books of literary and cultural criticism include Life on the Hyphen, The Havana Habit, Tongue Ties, and The Cuban Condition.

ALLAN PETERSON is the author of This Luminous, New and Selected Poems (Panhandler Books, 2024) and Life At All, a limited-edition book in color with digital scientific images by Richard Fox (Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, 2022). Earlier titles include Precarious (42 Miles Press, 2014s); All the Lavish in Common (Massachusetts, 2006), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Amid This and Also and Also are both forthcoming from SMU’s Project Poetica/Bridwell Press. He lives and writes in Ashland, Oregon.

CARLOS PIERA is a Spanish poet, essayist, and linguist from Madrid, born in 1942. His poetry was gathered in the volume Apartamentos de alquiler (Madrid, Ed. Abada, 2016).

IAIN HALEY POLLOCK is the author of two poetry collections, Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James, 2018) and Spit Back a Boy (Georgia, 2011). His work has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and an NAACP Image Award nomination. He directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College.

ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA was born in Malakhovka, a small town near Moscow. She is a member of the Moscow Union of Writers and the Russian PEN Center. Translations of her poetry appear in AGNI, Image, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship and an International Words on Borders’ Freedom Prize. To the Ashes, translated from Russian by Andrew Wachtel (Zephyr Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2021 AATSEEL Prize. Her new book in English, with the University of Pittsburgh Press, is Take Me to Stavanger.

MACKENZIE POLONYI is a Hungarian American poet. Her first book, Post-Volcanic Folk Tales (Akashic, 2024), is a National Poetry Series selection. She has an MFA from Cornell University.

DANI PUTNEY is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut full-length collection, Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. Their second full-length poetry collection is Mix-Mix (Baobab Press, 2025). They’re also the author of the poetry chapbook Dela Torre (Sundress Publications, 2022) and the creative nonfiction chapbook Swallow Whole (Bullshit Press, 2024). They have a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women. They live in Reno, Nevada.

ROBERTA QUANCE is a scholar of modern Spanish literature who has translated María Victoria Atencia and Federico García Lorca for Liverpool University Press (Hispanic Classics, 2014 and 2018). She is preparing a bilingual anthology of Carlos Piera’s work for publication.

ALEXIS QUINLAN is a writer, editor, and adjunct English teacher in New York. More poems can be found in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Juked, Paris Review, RHINO, and Tinderbox.

ADRIENNE RAPHEL is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin, 2020), Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press, 2022), and What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017). She holds a PhD from Harvard and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches at CUNY Baruch and serves as a mentor with the Periplus Collective.

LAURA READ is the author of But She Is Also Jane (Massachusetts, 2023), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; Dresses from the Old Country (BOA, 2018); Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral (Pittsburgh, 2011); and the chapbook The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She teaches at Spokane Falls Community College and Eastern Washington University.

RICHARD ROBBINS was raised in California and Montana, taught in Minnesota for many years, and recently moved back west to Oregon. He studied poetry writing with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees at the University of Montana, where he earned his MFA. Lynx House Press recently published his seventh book of poems, The Oratory of All Souls.

MARGARET RONDA is the author of the poetry collections, For Hunger (Saturnalia, 2018) and Personification (2010), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, VOLT, and West Branch. She is also the author of the critical study Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford, 2018). She teaches American poetry and environmental literature and theory at the University of California-Davis.

KATHLEEN ROONEY is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. She is the author of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, and her latest poetry collection is Where Are the Snow (Texas Review Press, 2022), winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize. Her latest novel is From Dust to Stardus (Lake Union Publishing, 2023). She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University.

EMILY ROSKO is the author of Weather Inventions (Akron, 2018); Prop Rockery (Akron, 2012); and Raw Goods Inventory (Iowa, 2006), and is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (Iowa, 2011). She teaches at the College of Charleston.

EMMALEA RUSSO is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, (Futurepoem, 2018), Wave Archive (Book*hug, 2019), Confetti (Hyperidean, 2022), and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Spike Art Magazine. Her first novel is Vivienne (Skyhorse, 2024).

MARY ANN SAMYN is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance (42 Miles Press, 2018) and The Return from Calvary (42 Miles Press, 2025). She teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University, and lives in West Virginia and Michigan.

SHANE SEELY is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The First Echo (Louisiana State, 2019). He directs the MFA program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

HEATHER SELLERS is the author of How to Make Poems: Form and Technique, as well as two recent collections, Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA, 2022) and The Present State of the Garden (Lynx House, 2021) She teaches poetry and nonfiction in the MFA Program at the University of South Florida.

LAUREN SHAPIRO is the author of BRID (Veliz, 2024); Arena (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2020), a New York Time Top Poetry Book of 2020; and Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry. She also translated Desperar en el Sahara (Waking in the Sahara) by Zaira Pacheco (Eulalia Books, 2024). She is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program and co-directs the Global Communication and Applied Translation Program.

SUSANNAH SHARPLESS is a PhD candidate in nineteenth-century American literature at Cornell University. Her poems appear in The Collapsar, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Jewish Currents.

MATTHEW SIEGEL is the author of Blood Work (Wisconsin, 2015), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize and finalist for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His poems appear in The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Sun. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, he lives in Oakland, California.

SANDRA SIMONDS is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Triptychs (Wave Books, 2022), and one novel, Assia (Noemi, 2023), which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Fiction. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

MEGAN SNYDER-CAMP is the author of three books of poetry: The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo, 2010), Wintering (Tupelo, 2016), and The Gunnywolf (Bear Star, 2016). Recent work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, The Hopper, and Image. She lives in Seattle.

KYRA SPENCE holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Her work appears in Cola Literary Review, Parentheses, and Pine Hills Review.

VIPOO SRIVILASA (COVER) is a Thai-born Australian artist, recognized as a leader in the field of ceramics. Over the past two decades, his work has engaged with complex questions of queerness, migration, and spiritual meaning. His art has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Saatchi Gallery, London; Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan; Nanjing Arts Institute, China; and the National Gallery of Thailand. He lives in Melbourne.

ELEANOR STANFORD is the author of four books of poetry, including Blue Yodel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2024). Her work appears in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She lives in the Philadelphia area.

ADRIENNE SU is the author of five books of poems, most recently Peach State (Pittsburgh, 2021), and a collection of essays on food and poetry, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (Paul Dry Books, 2024). She teaches at Dickinson College.

COLE SWENSEN is the author of nineteen volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Free Poetry, Boise State University, 2022) and Art in Time (Nightboat 2021). A Guggenheim fellow and winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, she divides her time between France and Rhode Island, where she teaches at Brown University.

GALE MARIE THOMPSON is the author of Mountain Amnesia, winner of the 2023 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Helen or My Hunger (Yes Yes, 2020), and Soldier On (Tupelo, 2015). Her poetry and prose appear in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and Mississippi Review. She lives in the mountains of North Georgia, where she works as an editor for YesYes Books and directs the creative writing program at Young Harris College.

TOM THOMPSON is the author of Passenger (Four Way, 2018), as well as Live Feed (Alice James, 2006) and The Pitch (Alice James, 2001). He lives in New York City.

OLIVIA SIO TSE is a poet from Texas and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, and Second Factory.

LEAH UMANSKY is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Of Tyrant (Word Works, 2024). She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has curated The COUPLET Reading Series in New York since 2011. She is also the creator of the Stay Brave Substack, which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her work appears in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day Project, American Poetry Review, The New York Times, Plume, and Poetry.

REBECCA VALLEY has published work in Black Warrior Review, Permafrost, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and on Poets.org. She has an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst. Her latest chapbook is The Salvageman (o-blek editions, 2022).

AMELIA SAGE VAN DONSEL is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst. Her recent work has been published in Conjunctions and honored by the Academy of American Poets. 

ANDREW WACHTEL is the co-founder and Director of Compass College of Art and Design in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He is also the Director of Educational Programs for inDrive, working to create an innovative university in Almaty, Kazakhstan. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he also works as a translator from multiple Slavic languages.  

ANNE WALDMAN is the author, most recently, of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024); Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House, 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, and interviews; and Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021). She is co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie, Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program. A new volume, Mesopotopia, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2025, in addition to the album Astral Omens (Fast Speaking Music/In Earliest Morning).

G.C. WALDREP lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University. His most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024). Recent work appears in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The Nation, New American Writing, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Yale Review.

JORRELL WATKINS is from Richmond, Virginia. He received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, Fulbright Japan, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His chapbook, If Only the Sharks Would Bite, won the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry. His debut full-length collection is PlayHouse (Curbstone 2024). Currently, he lives in Los Angeles and is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at USC.

KARY WAYSON lives in Port Orchard, Washington. Her most recent book of poetry is The Slip (Burnside Review, 2020).

CASSANDRA WHITAKER (she/they) is a trans writer living in rural Virginia. Their work has been published in Conjunctions, havehashad, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Mississippi Review. Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf is forthcoming from Jackleg Press in 2025. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

JEFF WHITNEY is the author of the chapbook Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2022). His poems appear in Adroit Journal, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch. He lives with his wife in Portland.

STELLA WONG is the author of Stem (Princeton University Press, 2024), Spooks (Saturnalia, 2022), winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Columbia, Wong’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Poetry, Lana Turner, and Prairie Schooner.

WILLIAM WOOLFITT is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point, 2024); two story collections, including Ring of Earth (Madville, 2023); and an essay collection, Eyes Moving Through the Dark (Orison, 2024). His fiction chapbook The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (2014) won the Epiphany Editions contest judged by Darin Strauss. His writings have appeared in African American Review, AGNI, Blackbird, Epoch, Gettysburg Review, Image, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry International, Ruminate, The Threepenny Review, and Tin House. He is the recipient of the Howard Nemerov Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Denny C. Plattner Award from Appalachian Review.

DAN WRIGGINS is a writer and musician from Maine. His debut collection Prince of Grass is forthcoming from Dear Life Records. He records and tours with the band Friendship, and lives in Philadelphia with his dog, Roy.