Contributors

ANNETTE C. BOEHM (she/they) is a queer, Autistic writer from Germany. Her poems can be found in Channel, Room, Bone Bouquet, Poetry, and other places.

JADEN BLEIER is an artist and writer currently based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her poems have appeared in The Oakland Review, Stonecoast Review, In Parentheses, and Maudlin House and have been awarded the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize. Jaden enjoys spending her time in the sunlight with her cat Cora and her ever growing number of houseplants. Find more online at jadenbleier.com.

GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS (is/eius), known as Catullus, was a poet at the end of the Roman Republic, a society on the precipice of collapse from a republic into a dictatorship. Catullus, influenced by Greek poets like Sappho, wrote poems that break from his Roman predecessors’ focus on historic and epic themes instead centering his life and relationships. Many of his poems famously trace the course of his romantic relationship with a woman he dubbed Lesbia from early passion through heartbreak and hostility.

ANTOINETTE CAULEY was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and draws her inspiration from the grittiness and beauty within her place of birth. Her work is heavily influenced by Black American hood culture with a feminist undertone. Cauley attended Mesa Community College where she studied Fine Art. Cauley has been featured on various publications including PBS, NPR, Forbes, and was named one of Phoenix Magazine’s “Great 48: 48 Most Influential people in the state of Arizona” in 2019. Cauley recently spent three years living and working in Berlin, Germany, where she completed an artist residency with CoGalleries.

SYLVIA CHAN is an amputee-cyborg writer, educator, activist, and author of We Remain Traditional (Center for Literary Publishing, 2018). Her poetry and essays appear in Poetry, Zócalo Public Square, The Cincinnati Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others, and have been named National Poetry Series finalist and Best American Essays Notable. Chan has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Zoeglossia, Bolt Cutters, and The Center for Art and Advocacy’s Right of Return. She lives in Tucson, where she works with crossover and foster youth, and writers who have been impacted by the criminal justice system.

SCOTT DALGARNO counts himself fortunate to have seen his poems in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Antioch Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Pilgrimage, America, Cagibi, and The Oregonian. His volume, Third-Class Relics, was a finalist for the 2024 Sally Albiso Prize and will be published by MoonPath Press in 2025. He lives among firs and dogwoods near Portland, Oregon, where he works for issues of justice.

CHARLOTTE EDWARDS is a writer based in Tennessee. She writes about the things she’s tired of hiding. When she isn’t pursuing her passion of writing she can be found reading. Her favorite book at the moment is Tender is the Flesh.

SHALA ERLICH is a practicing psychiatrist in Bellingham, Washington. Her short stories and essays appear in The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, The Ghost Story, Southern Humanities Review, and others. She recently completed a novel, set during a single night shift, about a psychiatry resident whose bipolar sister makes an unexpected appearance. She has received support from The Kenyon Review, Hedgebrook, and from dear writing friends, new and old.

DANIELLE FRANDINA is an educator and writer based in Portland, Oregon. She designs middle and high school curriculum for Facing History and Ourselves. Her short stories and essays have been published in Conceptions Southwest and Mountain Bluebird Magazine.

DU FU (712-770) was a Chinese formalist poet and public servant who lived during the Tang Dynasty. The An Lushan rebellion (755-763) shaped his life and poetry. During this time of extreme chaos Du Fu, chronically ill, was often on the run and at a distance from his family. His genius lies in capturing poignant moments that resonate between longing and utter despair.

CHELSEA CHRISTINE HILL is a mixed white and Latina poet from Houston, Texas. Her recent poems can be found in Copper Nickel, Poetry London, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at the University of Illinois and is a current doctoral student at the University of Chicago.

AMINA KAYANI is a queer Muhajir writer, editor, teacher, and ghostseer from unceded Cherokee and Muscogee land. She has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Aspen Summer Words Fellow in Fiction, and Hedgebrook, and she has served as an editor at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sycamore Review, and Kajal. Her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Florida Review, JOYLAND, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse and other queers.

MATT KELLEY b. 1997 is a contemporary artist from Phoenix, Arizona. His work bounces around from portraiture and abstraction, with a heavy emphasis on experimentation and unorthodox paintings applications. Matt is a believer in utilizing all parts of the material, as no scrap is unused in the artistic process. Elements of typography and bold color arrangements can often be found within his paintings to express his visual language and style that is still evolving and changing. Matt paints with an intuitive approach to color that is consistent in his paintings, whether the subject is abstract, gestural, or something in between.

WHITNEY KOO is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Any Gesture (Black Lawrence Press) and Founder/Executive Editor of Gasher Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as POETRY, the Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, American Literary Review, and others. She holds a PhD in English-Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder.

MARGAREE LITTLE is the translator of At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, forthcoming from Green Linden Press in November 2025. Her translations of Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam appear in American Poetry Review, Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Michigan Quarterly Review; her critical writing on translation appears in APR and Asymptote. Her first collection of poems, Rest (Four Way Books, 2018) won the Audre Lorde Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, and the Camargo Foundation, among others.

MAI MAGEED is a writer from Texas. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University, where she worked as an editor for EPOCH Magazine. As a writer, she is inspired by Wikipedia deep dives, public fights, and ’80s Europop music.

NATALIE MARINO is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Heavy Feather Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, wildness, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.

NICK MARTINO is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His debut poetry collection Scrap Book (Alice James Books) won the 2024 Alice James Editors’ Choice Award and will be published in 2026. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.

JOI MCCLAIN is a poet from St. Louis, Missouri, whose writing has evolved through competitive slam poetry to deliver powerful work that champions black womanhood through themes of intersectionality, faith, and social constructivism. Stage performance helped Joi discover her voice and taught her the impact of sound devices, which she now demonstrates in her written work by creating poems that resonate on the page and within the listener’s imagination.

CAMERON MCGILL is a poet, educator, and songwriter from Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of Meridians (Willow Springs Books) and In the Night Field (Augury Books/Brooklyn Arts Press). In 2022, he released his seventh studio album, The Widow Cameron. He teaches in the MFA program at Western Colorado University and is Associate Professor at Washington State University, where he co-directs the Visiting Writers Series. He lives and writes and plays the piano in Moscow, Idaho.

MATTHEW NISINSON (he/him) lives in Queens, New York, with his wife and daughter and their two cats. He has a JD and a BA in Latin. His poetry and translations have recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Novus Literary, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. You can find him on Instagram or Threads @lepidum_novum_libellum and on Twitter and Bluesky @mnisinson.

JOSHUA NGUYEN is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and has received fellowships from The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi and currently teaches at Tufts University.

WEIJIA PAN is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

KIM PARKO gathers in the hedge. She is the author of The Grotesque Child (Co-winner 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Prize) and Cure All (Caketrain Press, 2010). Her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review (2018 Poetry Prize), Black Warrior Review, The Brooklyn Review, DIAGRAM, Salt Hill, POETRY, Best Small Fictions 2023, and elsewhere. She is a professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

REYES RAMIREZ (he/him) is a Houstonian, writer, educator, and curator of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. He authored the short story collection The Book of Wanderers, a 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist, from University of Arizona Press, the poetry collection El Rey of Gold Teeth from Hub City Press, a finalist for the 2024 Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and Cerveza Songs: Houston, TX, a collection of craft beer poetry reviews and photography. His latest curatorial project, The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids, explores grids in contemporary Houston art, literature, history, and politics.

VALERIA RODRIGO is a writer from Valencia, Venezuela. She has been published or is forthcoming in Azaheres, Foglifter, and The Columbia Review.

RUKAN SAIF is a Bangladeshi American writer from Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Penn Review, phoebe, Furrow Magazine, ONE ART, and elsewhere. She just started ballet lessons and lives in Boston.

HERIE SUN is a writer and child of immigrants who grew up in Canada and now lives in New York City. He has poems published in Bellingham Review and Kestrel, and he has been invited to perform spoken word poetry at venues such as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday Night Slam, and the Verses Festival of Words. He loves a nice bowl of fruit for dessert.

JOANNE TILLEMANS has a poetry book, Broken Light, which was chosen by Marcus Jackson as a semi-finalist selection for the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize in 2024. She wrote a lyrical essay entitled “I Had Somewhat Left,” about an ectopic pregnancy, which was published in the anthology Rumors, Secrets and Lies, Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice by Anhinga Press. The essay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Calyx, and other journals. JoAnne graduates in June 2025 with an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University and has an MBA from Stanford. She grew up in prairie towns, was a modern dancer in New York, and a banker in London.

MARINA TSVETAEVA was one of the foremost Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1892 to a family of wealth, she lived most of her life in poverty and exile, following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. Tsvetaeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, living in Berlin and what was then Czechoslovakia before moving to Paris in 1925. In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she died in 1941. Despite isolation, political disaster, and personal tragedy, Tsvetaeva wrote extensively throughout her lifetime, including short lyrics, long narrative poems, plays in verse, and literary criticism.

JENNIFER VEECH’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Radar Poetry, South Carolina Review, The Comstock Review, American Religion, and The Poughkeepsie Review. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Her first book manuscript, which is evolving, was a semifinalist for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a waiter fellow at Bread Loaf.

MARGARET WACK is the author of The Body Problem (Orison Books, 2023), winner of the 2021 Orison Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in OnlyPoems, EcoTheo Review, Passages North, Grist, Arion, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a Poetry MFA candidate at North Carolina State University.

NIMA YUSHIJ (1897–1960) is considered the father of modern Persian poetry and possibly the most influential Iranian poet of the twentieth century. In fact, in Iran, modern or “new” poetry is sometimes referred to as she’r-e nimaa’i (“Nima-like poetry”). The richly symbolic layers of his poems speak of personal, political, and poetic struggles. His poetry is the subject of numerous books in Persian and has been set to music.