Contributors

AMY M. ALVAREZ is the author of the American Book Award-winning poetry collection Makeshift Altar. Born to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents in New York, New York, her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, place, and social justice. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), Macondo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. She currently teaches writing and literature at Boston College.

ADRIANA BELTRANO is a Floridian poet pursuing her MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a managing editor of The Hopkins Review. She was a 2024-25 Jake Adam York Prize finalist, was selected by Diane Seuss as an honorable mention for the 2025 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Her work can be found in Passages North, The Baltimore Review, and Puerto del Sol.

KB BROOKINS is the author of three books, including Pretty (2024), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. They are an assistant professor of creative writing at Santa Clara University. Follow KB online at @earthtokb.

SOPHIA CHONG is a poet. A semifinalist for the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, her poetry has appeared/is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and Black Warrior Review, among other places. Their criticism has appeared/is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Seneca Review, and fugue. They hold an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University-Newark.

YE CHUN has published two poetry collections, Travel Over Water and Lantern Puzzle, winner of the Berkshire Prize. Her novel, Straw Dogs of the Universe, received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and her story collection, Hao, was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library and Lit Hub. She has also published a novel in Chinese and four volumes of poetry translations. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, she teaches at Providence College and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

MARGARITA CRUZ was raised between Tamaulipas, Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona. She is currently a part-time educator, executive member of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, and contributor for Flaglive! She has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Macondo Writer’s Workshop, and others. In 2026, her manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and she was listed as a multi-finalist for Creative Flagstaff ’s 2026 Viola Awards. Her writing is featured in Rattle, Ploughshares, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, among others. Find more of her at shortendings.com.

ROSE DEMARIS is a poet based in Montana. Her poetry appears in New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, on poets.org, and elsewhere. She has received Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Literature Award and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and her work has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her translations of poems by Palestinian Lebanese writer May Ziadeh were spotlit by the Academy of American Poets. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow.

MANNY DETTMANN (they/he) is a trans and queer poet, performer, arts educator, and the author of Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises. They earned their MFA in poetry from New York University and have received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Dettmann was the winner of the 2023 Peseroff Prize in Poetry, selected by Jake Skeets, and their poems have been nominated for 2025 Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Their work has appeared in publications such as The Adroit Journal, Stanford’s poetry journal Mantis, FENCE’s 25th Anniversary Issue, and The Southeast Review, among others.

ZOË FAY-STINDT is a queer, land-based poet and essayist living on unceded Cherokee land (Asheville, North Carolina) and raised by the Tar and Hérault rivers. Their work has been Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best New Poets-nominated and featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. They are a student and teacher of belonging and embodied relationship to land who believes in slowness, reciprocal relationship with place and people, and queer, decolonized, kincentric futures.

MCKENDY FILS-AIMÉ is a New England based Haitian-American poet, organizer, and teaching artist. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and Periplus. Over the span of nearly two decades, Mckendy has represented New England in several regional and national poetry slams, performing on numerous semi-final and final stages. Mckendy’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Muzzle, American Literary Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, sipèstisyon, will be published by YesYes Books in 2026.

LUIZA FLYNN-GOODLETT (she/her) is the author of Mud in Our Mouths (Northwestern University Press, 2025) and Look Alive (Cowles Poetry Book Prize, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2021), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Lossland (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry can be found in Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, The Common, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press, Foglifter. She was raised in the wilds of Tennessee and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and rescue dog.

ELIZABETH GALOOZIS’s debut full-length collection, Law of the Letter (2025), won the Hillary Gravendyk Prize from the Inlandia Institute. Her poems have appeared in Air/Light, Pidgeonholes, RHINO, Witness, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. She serves as a reader for The Maine Review and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and for The Best of the Net. She works as a librarian and lives in Southern California. Elizabeth can be found on Instagram and Blue Sky at @thisamericanliz and at elizabethgaloozis.com.

DARA GOODALE (they/them) is a Romanian-American queer multigenre writer and university student living in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Poetry Journal, Cleaver Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, ANMLY, and more. Dara is a Pushcart nominee and was a finalist for the Gasher Press 2025 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize. You can find them on Instagram @daragoodale and online at daragoodale.com.

JONIS HARTMANN is a German writer, translator, publisher, literary moderator, and co-founder of three Hamburg reading series. He has published four poetry collections, and his writing has been translated into Arabic, Belarusian, Croatian, Dutch, and English. Translations of his work have been published or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, and Conduit.

SAÚL HERNÁNDEZ is a queer writer, who was raised by former undocumented parents. He has an MFA in creative writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. Saúl is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. His debut poetry collection, How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters, is a 2025 Lambda Literary Award Winner, a Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Award Winner, was longlisted for a PEN Open Book Award, and received the Institute of Letters’ honor-winner for First Book of Poetry.

KATHY JIANG is a poet and therapist from the D.C. area. Her work, which has been nominated for Best New Poets and received support from Brooklyn Poets and other organizations, is featured in Sundog Lit, Oxford Poetry, Variant Lit, and elsewhere. She is an editor and facilitator at Seventh Wave and a poetry reader at The Adroit Journal, and she will be featured in the 2026 Poets in Pajamas series.

CHIAGOZIEM JIDEOFOR is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Passages North, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.

HOHO KUO studied painting under the guidance of her father, the artist Guo Yu, from childhood. She graduated from the stage design department of the Central Academy of Drama and later from the directing department of the Beijing Film Academy. Her directed commercial film Lively City was awarded the Gold Lion Award at the China International Advertising Festival. Her paintings have been shortlisted for prestigious awards and exhibitions, including the John Moores Painting Prize (China). She has collaborated on art-commerce projects with brands including AMN Art Audio, UNTAP Fun Paint, GLORIA, and IMXS. She maintains active presence in the art world as both a painter and independent director.

Born in South Korea and raised in Peru, AE HEE LEE is currently based in Wisconsin and is the author of ASTERISM, selected for the 2022 Dorset Prize, and the poetry chapbooks Bedtime || Riverbed, Dear bear, and Connotary, the last of which won the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.

TING LIN is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction writing can be found in The Nation and The Baffler. She holds a BA & MS from Stanford University.

Born and raised in Kolkata, RUDRA KISHORE MANDAL graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in Hyderabad and worked as a graphic designer over a period of six years. They resumed creating independent artworks after moving back to Kolkata in 2008. They have exhibited in group shows nationally and internationally in collaboration with Alliance Francaise, American Center, British Council, Italian Ministry of Culture, Eurasia, Spazio Tempo Arte, AIAPI, UNESCO, Queer Asia, Amnesty International, Blackwall, SOAS University London and British Museum, KCC and ICCR in Kolkata, India Art Fair, Delhi, and The Art Society of India, Mumbai.

DAN MARCANTUONO is a writer and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. His fiction has appeared in Palaver Arts Magazine and won the 2020 Edward W. Moses Creative Writing Competition. He earned his MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University.

SHENA MCAULIFFE is the author of three award-winning books: We Are a Teeming Wilderness (2023), Glass Light Electricity: Essays (2020), and The Good Echo: a Novel (2018). She has won a Pushcart Prize, The Poets & Writers’ Writers Exchange Award, and other prizes, and her work has been published in Conjunctions, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Ocean State Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Schenectady, New York, where she takes a lot of walks, and is an associate professor of creative writing.

JAEL MONTELLANO is a Mexican-born writer and poet. Her essay “The Sea, the Shell & the Pearl” was nominated for 2025 Best of the Net and her work is featured in Psaltery & Lyre, Poet Lore, La Piccioletta Barca, ANMLY Lit, and more. She can be found on the heels of a Malinois.

YUNKYO MOON-KIM is a poet and education worker residing between mountains and seas.

FLORENCE MURRY is the author of Last Run Before Sunset. Her poems have appeared in Pinch, Atlanta Review, Slipstream Press Magazine, Off the Coast, Bluestem Magazine, Westchester Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and others. Florence lives in Southern California with her husband and two cats. Her website is florencemurrywriter.com.

JHIO JAN NAVARRO hails from the island of Negros in the Philippines. Translations of his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, and Poetry Northwest. He is currently based in the island of Panay, working as an instructor at the University of the Philippines Visayas.

ERIKA NESTOR is a poet and paralegal from the Midwest. Her poems have been published in Passages North, The Journal, HAD, DIALOGIST, LEVELER, and elsewhere. She lives in Boston.

THU ANH NGUYEN is a Vietnamese American poet whose poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in the Southern Humanities Review, Cider Press Review, The Crab Orchard Review, and The Salt River Review. Nguyen’s poems were also named as a semi-finalist for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize for the Southern Humanities Review. She was honored with a writing residency with The Inner Loop Poetry Series in Washington, D.C. She also writes about equity, justice, and community through literacy. Her essays on the importance of reading diverse literature have been featured in Literacy Today.

MIT CHIT PAING is a queer poet and writer from Palaw, Tanintharyi region, Myanmar. Paing’s works go beyond mere beautification, conveying nuanced feelings and ideas through layered, dreamlike narratives that blend fantasy with reality.

GENEVIEVE PLUNKETTis the author of PREPARE HER: Stories and IN THE LOBBY OF THE DREAM HOTEL. A recipient of an O. Henry Award and the Sewanee Review’s Andrew Lytle Prize, her short fiction can be found in the Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Electric Literature. Her second novel THE LONELY GIRL’S VEGETABLE PATCH is forthcoming from Feminist Press.

DREW ROLLINS is a writer, poet, and translator who grew up in Maryland and Bulgaria. His work has been published in The Atlantic and Body Literature. A recent graduate of the Boston University Creative Writing MFA Program, he is cobbling together his first collection, which has to do with faith, human nature, and also regular nature.

OLIVIA ROMBAK is an acrylic and watercolor painter from southeastern Wisconsin, studying studio art and biology. Specializing in portraiture, she creates narrative-driven work rooted in lived experience. From May to August 2025, she completed an artist residency with Milwaukee’s Artist Resource Network, producing a six-piece painting series. This body of work served as the capstone to a three-month investigation in which she interviewed water professionals, exploring the Great Lakes region, its environmental crises, and its multifaceted cultural landscape. After completing her undergraduate studies, Olivia intends to pursue a graduate degree in medical illustration.

LEAH SAINT MARIE wrote the award-winning documentary, Price of Honor, which got Yaser Said on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted (the documentary led to his arrest in 2021). Her script, Spoonful of Sugar, premiered at Fantastic Fest (2022) and was sold to Shudder. Her short film, Good Girl, won the Paris International Film Festival. She’s working with Cold Iron Pictures on an Italian film, My Marcello, which is loosely based on her life as a film projectionist. She’s been published in The New York Times and the Los Angles Times.

T.R. SAN is a rakhine-“burmese” lesbian poet loosely based on the traditional lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, with work found in The Cincinnati Review, The Best of the Net, Smokelong Quarterly, The Offing, and HAD. Read & reach @thoushallkill on Twitter or trsan.neocities.org.

SARAH SHAW is a cartoonist, illustrator, and assistant professor of illustration at Maine College of Art & Design. She makes autobiographical, sociopolitical, and historical comics with a handmade, decorative flair. She also crafts visual essays, zines, comics, poems, and collages that capture the every day.

SABRINA SIEW is a Midwest-raised, New York City-living creative with a deep appreciation for the ocean, old and new friends, and sparkling fruit drinks. She is currently an MFA in writing candidate at Columbia University, with her work appearing or forthcoming in publications like Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, and more. Born into a noisy Malaysian Chinese American family, she writes poems, prose, and postcards.

After years in the classroom, SARAH DICKENSON SNYDER now carves in stone, sculls on the Connecticut River, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has five poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards, 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards, 2023), and To Eve (Nixes Mate Review, 2026). Several poems have been nominated for The Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. Her work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO. Find her at sarahdickensonsnyder.com.

A. A. SRINIVASAN is an American writer and translator based in Northern Germany and Southern California. In addition to a Pushcart Prize anthology, her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, The Literary Review, and elsewhere.

ELICA SUE is a lifelong resident of Southern California. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Pinch, The Gravity of the Thing, and elsewhere

GRACE H. ZHOU is a poet, anthropologist, and educator. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net, and have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, The Margins, Ninth Letter, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, diasporous, is the winner of the 2025 St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027. Her chapbook, Soil Called a Country, was selected for Newfound’s 2023 Emerging Poets Series. She teaches at the University of Edinburgh.