Contributors to Issue XX
Elinam Agbo
Elinam Agbo was born in Ghana and grew up in Kansas. A winner of the 2018 PEN/Dau Short Story Award for Emerging Writers, she was a 2019 Aspen Words Fellow and attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Molotov Cocktail, and Nimrod. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she is currently a Zell postgraduate fellow.
Dilruba Ahmed
Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, April 2020). Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Nick Almeida
Nick Almeida’s fiction has appeared in Mid-American Review, Baltimore Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of The Michener Center for Writers, where he served as Editor-In-Chief for Bat City Review.
Verónica González Arredondo
Verónica González Arredondo (Guanajuato, Mexico) holds a PhD in Arts from the Universidad de Guanajuato and a Master’s in Philosophy from the Universidad de Zacatecas. She has received several prestigious Latin American literary awards, including Mexico’s National Ramón López Velarde Prize in Poetry/Premio Nacional de Poesía “Ramón López Velarde,” for her book of poems Ese cuerpo no soy/I Am Not That Body (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2015) as well as the Dolores Castro Prize /Premio Dolores Castro, an annual prize awarded to a woman writing exceptional and socially conscious work in Spanish, for her book Verde Fuegos de Espíritus/Green Fires of the Spirits (Ayuntamiento de Aguascalientes, 2014). Voracidad, grito y belleza animal/Voraciousness, Screams and Animal Beauty, a book of essays, was also published by Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in 2014. Verónica González Arredondo’s books of verse have previously been translated into, and published in, French and Portuguese. From 2017-2018 she held a FONCA fellowship for younger artists through the Fondo Nacional para la Culturas y las Artes/National Fund for Arts and Culture. “Mamá, what is that in the distance, far out at sea?” and “Epitaph” are from “Al aire el cuerpo duele”/“The Body Pains the Wind,” a section in Verónica González Arredondo’s award-winning second book Ese cuerpo no soy/I Am Not that Body that references a line from Dolores Castro’s verse.
b: william bearhart
b: william bearhart is a direct descendent of the St Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, a graduate from the Lo-Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and currently works as a poker dealer in a small Wisconsin casino when not writing or editing. His work can be found in Boston Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others.
Ina Cariño
Ina Cariño was born in Baguio City in the Philippines. Her poetry and prose appear in New England Review, The Oxford Review of Books, Fugue, Tupelo Quarterly, Nat. Brut, Raleigh Review, VIDA Review, and December Magazine, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State University in Raleigh, NC, and was a 2019 Kundiman Fellow. Find out more at inacarino.com.
K-Ming Chang
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist in poetry. Her debut novel Bestiary is forthcoming from One World / Random House in September 2020. She lives in New York and is located at kmingchang.com.
Allison A. deFreese
Allison A. deFreese (Portland, Oregon) has lived in Mexico, Bolivia and Japan. She has previously translated work by Karla Marrufo, José Castillo Baeza, Amado Nervo, and other Mexican writers. She has three book-length translations forthcoming in 2020: a translation and trilingual adaptation of José R. Cervantes Carrillo’s A Practical Guide to Learning the Yucatec Mayan Language (Maldonado Editores del MAYAB); María Negroni’s Elegy for Joseph Cornell (Dalkey Archive Press), and Soaring to New Heights (Renuevo), the autobiography of NASA astronaut José Moreno Hernández who spent part of his childhood in Michoacán and worked as a migrant farmworker in California. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s James A. Michener Center for Writers, as well as an MA in Spanish Translation from the University of Texas at Brownsville (now Rio Grande Valley), and for fifteen years has facilitated adult education courses in Spanish for colleges in the Northwest.
Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Nicole Cecilia Delgado is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and book artist. In 2016, she founded La Impresora, an editorial studio specialized in small-scale independent publishing. Her latest books include: Apenas un cántaro: Poemas 2007-2017 (Ediciones Aguadulce, 2017), and Periodo especial (Aguadulce/La Impresora, 2019), which explores the socioeconomic mirror images between the Greater Antilles in light of Puerto Rico’s ongoing financial crisis. Delgado is widely regarded as one of the leading Puerto Rican poets of her generation, and as a cultural worker bringing together artists, activists, and writers from across the Americas.
Sam Doores
Sam Doores's debut solo album Sam Doores will be available March 13 from New West Records. His albums with the Deslondes and his compilations for Mashed Potato Records are available online. To learn more about Sam and see his upcoming tour dates, visit his website at samdooresmusic.com.
Laura Cesarco Eglin
Laura Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst, (co•im•press), which won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. Her translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician have appeared in a variety of journals, including Timber, Exchanges, Modern Poetry in Translation, Eleven Eleven, The Massachusetts Review, Cordella Magazine, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and The Puritan. Cesarco Eglin is the author of six poetry collections, including Calling Water by Its Name (trans. Spanbauer; Mouthfeel Press), Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (The Lune), Reborn in Ink (trans. Jagoe and Kercheval; The Word Works), and the forthcoming chapbook Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House). She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books.
Robert Fanning
Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Severance (Salmon Poetry, 2019), Our Sudden Museum, (Salmon Poetry, 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006), as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, 2015) and Old Bright Wheel (The Ledge Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, failbetter, and other journals. He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University and the founder and facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series, an annual series that features prominent and emerging Michigan poets and writers, along with musicians. More info at robertfanning.wordpress.com.
Yen Ha
Yen is an architect and maker of spaces, stories, drawings and dinners. Born in Saigon, she currently resides in New York City where she co-founded Front Studio, an architecture firm, in 2001. Yen’s short stories have been honored by Glimmertrain’s Short Story New Writers Contests and the New Rivers Press American Prize. Awarded residencies by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and MASS MoCA, her work has been published in Crack the Spine, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and Hypertext. Her drawings are carried by Goods for the Study in Greenwich Village and at 20x200.com.
Summer J. Hart
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual narratives are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Northern New England Review, Third Point Press, South Broadway Ghost Society, Blood Orange: experimental poetry tarot, and Post Ghost Press. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in galleries including Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA; and The InLiquid Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.
Kristen Herbert
Kristen Herbert moved to rural Hungary in 2016 to teach English. After learning the Hungarian language, she studied in a literary translation workshop at the Balassi Institute in Budapest. Her translations have been published in the Balatonfüred Translator’s Notebook (Füredi Fordítói Füzetek) and the Hungarian Literature Online journal. Today she lives and works in Budapest. While in the States, she published her own work of fiction in Cleaver Magazine.
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Photo: Victoria M. BeeRebecca Gayle Howell is the author of American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse; among her awards are fellowships from United States Artists, the Carson McCullers Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center, as well as a Pushcart Prize. Howell lives in Kentucky and serves as Poetry Editor for the Oxford American. She translates women writing from the Global South.
Tom C. Hunley
New poems by Tom C. Hunley are forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly and Rattle. His latest books are the poetry collection Here Lies (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018) and the second edition of the textbook The Poetry Gymnasium (McFarland, 2019). He is a professor in the MFA/BA Creative Writing programs at Western Kentucky University.
Brionne Janae
Brionne Janae is a poet living in Brooklyn. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook and Vermont Studio Center Alumni and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry and prose have been published by the Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. Brionne’s first collection is titled After Jubilee and was published by Boaat Press.
Lesley Jenike
Lesley Jenike's poems and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, POETRY, West Branch, Shenandoah, The Bennington Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Her most recent collections are Punctum: (Kent State University Press, 2017) and Holy Island (Gold Wake, 2017). She teaches literature and creative writing at the Columbus College of Art and Design and is a regular contributor to Ploughshares’ blog. She lives in Columbus, OH with her husband and two children.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Sneha Subramanian Kanta has been awarded the first Vijay Nambisan Fellowship 2019. She is a recipient of The Charles Wallace Fellowship 2019-20 at The University of Stirling, Scotland. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and reader for Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry. Her chapbook Ghost Tracks is forthcoming with Louisiana Literature Press (Southeastern Louisiana University).
David Kirby
Photo: Ramsey MathewsDavid Kirby’s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” His latest poetry collection is More Than This. He teaches English at Florida State University.
Emily Lawson
Emily Lawson is a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in poetry at the University of Virginia, where she teaches poetry and serves as Editor for Meridian. She studied cross-cultural philosophy at Hampshire College. Her poems and lyric essays have appeared in Sixth Finch, Indiana Review, THRUSH, Frontier Poetry, and DIAGRAM.
Brian Malone
Brian Malone teaches English at the University of Idaho. His nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in Storyscape Journal, Glassworks, and Blue Earth Review.
Katie Marya
Katie Marya is a poet, translator, and installation artist originally from Atlanta, GA. She earned an MFA in poetry from Bennington College and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing in Lincoln, NE. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and Five Points as the recipient of the 2018 James Dickey Prize for Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Nebraska Arts Council.
Daniel Mazzacane
Daniel Mazzacane is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in The L.A. Times, the performance series Unheard L.A., and The Wrangler. Born and raised in Riverside, CA, he writes towards his roots, the intersections of poverty and queer identity. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @DanMazzWrites.
Makena Onjerika
Makena Onjerika won the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at Fireside, Wasafiri, New Daughters of Africa, Nairobi Noir, Jalada and others. She teaches at the Nairobi Fiction Writing Workshop and edited the workshop's first anthology, Digital Bedbugs.
Claudia Prado
Photo: Eduardo PiovanoClaudia Prado was born in Argentinian Patagonia and currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. She is the author of three books of Spanish-language poetry: El interior de la ballena, which received the bronze Concurso Régimen de Fomento a la Producción Literaria Nacional y Estímulo a la Industria Editorial del Fondo nacional de las Artes; Viajar de noche; and the forthcoming Primero. At present, she facilitates Spanish-language creative writing workshops for numerous immigrant organizations in New York and New Jersey and is a current Fellow of Utopian Practice at Culture Push (New York), awarded for boundary-pushing, interdisciplinary, and socially engaged artwork.
Martin Rock
Martin Rock is a poet, editor, and ghostwriter for the causes and people he believes in. He is the author of the poetry collections Residuum (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2015) & Dear Mark (Brooklyn Arts Press 2012). With Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, he edited Catherine Breese Davis; on the life and work of an American Master. He holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from NYU and serves on the advisory board of the Poetry Society of America and the board of the Unsung Masters Series. He is currently Senior Writer, Policy for Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Andrea L. Rogers
Andrea L. Rogers is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a graduate of the Low-Rez program at the Institute for American Indian Arts. She grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is a teacher at an all-girls public school and the mom of three daughters. At IAIA, she was mentored by several strong Indigenous writers and teachers. While there, she completed her short story collection Man Made Monsters, a meditation on love, loneliness, family, and the monsters in society that walk with us. Native people are centered in this collection, along with a cast of vampires, werewolves, zombies, aliens, ghosts, two handsome Princes, and a Goatboy. Her short stories have been published in Transmotion, Kweli Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, and The Santa Fe Literary Review. Her children’s book with Capstone, Mary and the Trail of Tears: A Cherokee Removal Survival Story came out in January 2020. Her essay “My Oklahoma History” is included in You Too? 25 Voices Share Their #MeToo Stories.
Lara Dopazo Ruibal
Lara Dopazo Ruibal was born in Marín (Galicia, Spain). She has a BA in Journalism and two MAs: one in International Cooperation and one in Theoretical and Practical Philosophy. Dopazo Ruibal has published four poetry collections and she is the co-editor and co-author of the experimental essay volume A través das marxes: Entrelazando feminismos, ruralidades e comúns. Her poetry collection ovella was awarded the Francisco Añón Prize in 2015, and claus e o alacrán received the Fiz Vergara Vilariño Prize in 2017. Dopazo Ruibal was a resident artist at the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome for the academic year 2018/2019.
Maureen Seaton
Maureen Seaton has authored numerous poetry collections, solo and collaborative — most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019) and Fisher (Black Lawrence, 2018), both of which contain poems previously published in Waxwing. Her awards include the Lambda Literary, NEA, and Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin, 2008, 2018), also garnered a “Lammy”. With poet Neil de la Flor, she edited the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga, 2018). Seaton is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
Brian Simoneau
Brian Simoneau is the author of the poetry collection River Bound (C&R Press, 2014). His second collection, No Small Comfort, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, Salamander, Third Coast, and other journals. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, he lives near Boston with his family.
Amanda Turner
Amanda Turner is the author of the chapbook Of Nectar, selected and introduced by A. Van Jordan for the 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, she has taught poetry writing and composition courses at Santa Clara University and has been an assistant poetry editor for Poetry Northwest. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including CALYX, COLUMBIA: A Journal of Literature and Art, Fourteen Hills, The Sycamore Review, and The Western Humanities Review. Her poem “What Clowns” was chosen by Natalie Diaz for inclusion in the anthology Best New Poets 2017. She lives in Portland, OR with her husband, daughter, and dog.
Donna Vorreyer
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), both from Sundress Publications. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, Whale Road Review, and many other journals. Her third full-length collection is forthcoming from Sundress in 2020.
Karrie Waarala
Karrie Waarala’s work has appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Southern Indiana Review, PANK, The Collagist, and Vinyl. She is the poetry editor for the museum of americana and holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Program at University of Southern Maine. Recipient of the 2012 Pocataligo Poetry Prize, a Best of the Net finalist, and a multiple Pushcart nominee, Karrie has also received critical acclaim for her one-woman show, LONG GONE: A Poetry Sideshow, which is based on her collection of circus poems. She really wishes she could tame tigers and swallow swords.
Becca Wild
Becca Wild is a queer cross-genre writer living in Kingston, New York. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Maudlin House, Gone Lawn, Trampset, and additional publications. She serves as a short fiction editor at Crack the Spine and is a member of the Kingston Writers’ Studio. You can find her on Twitter @wildbirdbecca.
Tara Isabel Zambrano
Tara Isabel Zambrano works as a semiconductor chip designer. Her work has been published in Tin House Online, The Southampton Review, Slice, Triquarterly, Yemassee, Passages North, and others. Recently, she served as Flash Fiction Editor at Newfound.org. Tara moved from India to the United States two decades ago and holds an instrument rating for single engine aircraft. She lives in Texas.
Maya Jewell Zeller
Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011); her prose appears in such places as Brevity, Bellingham Review, and Booth Journal, and recent poems are out in Glass Poetry, Gulf Coast, and Pleiades. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya teaches for Central Washington University and edits for Scablands Books. She is also currently at work on a memoir called The Privilege Button. Find her on Twitter @MayaJZeller and Instagram @mayajewellzeller, or visit mayajewellzeller.com for more info.
