Contributors to Issue XXI
Allison Adair
Allison Adair’s first collection, The Clearing, was selected by Henri Cole as the winner of Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, and ZYZZYVA; and have received the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, and the Orlando Prize. Adair teaches at Boston College.
Andrew Adair
Andrew Adair is a writer/translator from Indiana currently living in Mexico City by way of New York. He is Editor-at-Large for Mexico at Asymptote Journal and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Latin American Literature Today, BrooklynRail, and The Hopper. In 2021, Random House Mondadori will publish a Spanish anthology of the poetry of Guadalupe “Pita” Amor, co-edited by Adair. He is currently translating work by José Gorostiza, Guadalupe Amor, Rosario Castellanos and Belén López Peiró. He is also a founding member of the translators’ collective, Falsos Amigos and can be found on Twitter at: @a_dear_raw_din.
Hussain Ahmed
Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist. His poems are featured or forthcoming in POETRY, The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, Transition Magazine, Passages North, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi.
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Sarah Ghazal Ali is a Pakistani-American poet with roots in California. She is currently an MFA candidate and Juniper Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she also teaches composition. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tinderbox, Wildness, Up the Staircase Quarterly, homonym, and others. Find her on Twitter @sarwwaa.
Jenny Bhatt
Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, and reviewer. She is a Contributing Editor at PopMatters. Her first short story collection is due out in 2020 and her first book-length literary translation will also be out in 2020. Her nonfiction writing has appeared or is upcoming in various respectable journals in the US and India such as The Atlantic, BBC Culture, NPR, Washington Post, Longreads, Literary Hub, the Millions, Electric Literature, Scroll, etc. Her fiction has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and the 2018 Best American Short Stories. She was a finalist in the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. Having lived and worked her way around India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the US, she now lives in a Dallas suburb. Find her at jennybhattwriter.com.
Adrian Blevins
Adrian Blevins is the author of the full-length poetry collections Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the Wilder Prize, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha; the chapbooks Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes; and the co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. She is the recipient of many awards including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among others. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Melissa Llanes Brownlee is a Native Hawaiian writer with an MFA in Fiction from UNLV. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Booth: A Journal, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, The Citron Review, SFWP Quarterly, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2018 New American Fiction Prize and the 2019 Brighthorse Prize. She likes to retweet stuff on twitter @lumchanmfa or talk story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com. She currently lives, pretty much, in the middle of Japan.
Lauren Brazeal
Lauren Brazeal’s first full-length collection of poetry, Gutter (YesYes Books, 2018), centered around her homelessness as a teenager. Her individual poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Verse Daily, Barrelhouse, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is currently earning her PhD in Literature from UT Dallas and working on her second full-length manuscript, written with the collaboration of the Huaorani people (an indigenous tribe in Amazonian Ecuador she has worked with for many years).
Cathy Linh Che
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles. She won the Kundiman Poetry prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies for her book Split. She lives in Queens.
M.S. Coe
M.S. Coe grew up in the Southwestern United States and currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her stories have been published in Nashville Review, Antioch Review, Electric Lit, Five on the Fifth, and other journals. New Veronia, Coe’s first novel, came out with Clash Books in November 2019. She is the co-editor of Eggtooth Editions, which publishes chapbooks in any genre.
Bailey Cohen-Vera
Bailey Cohen-Vera is the Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. A poet, essayist, and book reviewer, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Grist, Sugar House Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Spectacle, Cherry Tree, and Boulevard, among elsewhere. In the fall, Bailey will begin his candidacy for an MFA as a Wiley Birkhofer Fellow in Poetry at NYU, where he will write obsessively about bananas.
Noa Covo
Noa Covo is a teenaged writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Reckoning, Lunate, and Newfound. Her microchapbook, Bouquet of Fears, will be published by Nightingale and Sparrow this July. She can be found on Twitter @covo_noa.
Heidi Czerwiec
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com.
Satya Dash
Satya Dash’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Florida Review, Prelude, The Cortland Review, Lunch Ticket, and Poetry@Sangam, amongst others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He is a two-time Orison Anthology and Best New Poets nominee. He spent his early years in Odisha and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at @satya043.
María do Cebreiro
María do Cebreiro (Santiago de Compostela, 1976) is a Galician poet, translator, and critic. She has published over ten books of poetry, co-authored two, and won several awards, most recently the Galician Critics’ Prize for her collection, O deserto (The Desert, 2016), published in English by Shearsman books in Keith Payne’s translation in 2019. Her book Non son de aquí (I Am Not From Here) was published in 2010 by Shearsman books, in translation Helena Miguélez Carballeira’s translation, and her work has appeared in Asymptote and ANMLY. She holds a Ph.D in Literary Theory from the University of Santiago de Compostela and currently teaches in the Philology department at the same university.
Jai Dulani
Jai Dulani is a Desi trans multi-genre writer. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, VONA, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. His work has appeared in Black Girl Dangerous, Open City, the anthology Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic, and is forthcoming in Foglifter. He is currently Assistant Managing Editor of Bellingham Review.
Kathy Fagan
Kathy Fagan’s fifth book, Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill and the Ohio Arts Council. Recent work has also appeared in Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and The Nation. Fagan directs the MFA Program at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she also serves as series co-editor for the OSU Press/Wheeler Poetry Prize.
Kathy Fish
Kathy Fish has published five collections of fiction, most recently Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018, (Matter Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, and numerous other journals, textbooks, and anthologies. Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” was featured in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and will appear in an upcoming edition of The Norton Reader. Fish teaches for the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver. She is the recipient of a 2020 Ragdale Foundation Fellowship.
Mag Gabbert
Mag Gabbert holds a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University and an MFA from the University of California at Riverside. Her essays and poems can be found in 32 Poems, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Thrush, Hobart, Phoebe, Birmingham Poetry Review, and many other journals. Mag teaches creative writing at Southern Methodist University and for Writing Workshops Dallas; she serves as the interviews editor for Underblong Journal. For more information, please visit maggabbert.com.
Gavin Yuan Gao
Gavin Yuan Gao holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Poet Lore, Nashville Review, The Boiler Journal, Winter Tangerine, and elsewhere.
Kate Gaskin
Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, which won YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Pleiades, 32 Poems, Passages North, and The Southern Review, among others, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2017 she won The Pinch’s Literary Award in Poetry.
Eugene Gloria
Eugene Gloria is the author of four books of poems — Sightseer in This Killing City (Penguin-Random House, 2019); My Favorite Warlord (Penguin, 2012), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Hoodlum Birds (Penguin, 2006), and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (Penguin, 2000), a National Poetry Series selection and recipient of the Asian American Literary Award. He is the John Rabb Professor of Creative and Performing Arts and English Professor at DePauw University.
Naihobe Gonzalez
Naihobe Gonzalez is a Venezuelan-American writer living in Oakland, California. She is a fellow of the Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab and the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, and an alumna of the Tin House Summer Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Acentos Review, The Offing, and HerStry. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University and conducts policy research when she's not writing.
Siân Griffiths
Siân Griffiths lives in Ogden, Utah, where she teaches creative writing at Weber State University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, and Booth among other publications. She is the author of the novels Borrowed Horses and Scrapple and the short fiction chapbook The Heart Keeps Faulty Time. Currently, she reads fiction as part of the editorial teams at Barrelhouse and American Short Fiction. For more information, please visit sbgriffiths.com.
Maricela Guerrero
Maricela Guerrero, (Ciudad de México, 1977), is a writer of poems and other texts while also trying to grow succulents in between stints at the office. She has published El sueño de toda célula (Ediciones Antílope with The Veracruz Cultural Institute), which won the Clemencia Isaura Award for Poetry in 2018 and Kilimanjaro (Cardboard House Press, 2019, tr. Stalina Villarreal). Since 2018, she has been part of The National System of Artistic Creators in Mexico. She can be found at @papelcontante.
Amy Haejung
Amy Haejung lives in New York and works in publishing. She was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Kundiman Mentorship Lab in fiction. This is her first publication.
Leslie Harrison
Leslie Harrison’s second book, The Book of Endings (Akron 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first book, Displacement (Mariner, 2009) won the Bakeless Prize in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and is at work on a third book, tentatively titled Apocalypse Box. These poems are from that manuscript.
Brooks Haxton
Brooks Haxton’s seventh collection of poems from Alfred A. Knopf is due out early in 2021. He has also published four books of translations and a nonfiction account of his son’s career in high-stakes poker. He has taught for many years in the graduate writing programs at Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College.
L.I. Henley
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree, California, where she continues to live and make art. She is the author of two chapbooks, Desert with a Cabin View, and The Finding. Her second full-length collection, Starshine Road, won the 2017 Perugia Press Prize. In October, 2019, What Books Press of Santa Monica published her novella in verse, Whole Night Through. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Rhino, Tupelo Quarterly, Diode, Zone 3, Tinderbox, The Superstition Review, The American Literary Review, Ninth Letter, Thrush, and elsewhere. She has written two collaborative chapbooks, respectively, with Jennifer K. Sweeney and Laura Maher. Visit her at www.lihenley.com.
Gary Jackson
Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Sun. He was featured in the 2013 New American Poetry Series by the Poetry Society of America. He is an associate professor at the College of Charleston and is the associate poetry editor at Crazyhorse.
Marlin M. Jenkins
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and currently lives in Minnesota. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan's MFA program, his work has found homes with Indiana Review, The Rumpus, and Kenyon Review Online, among others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.com.
Andrew Koch
Andrew Koch is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize for emerging writers, and his work has recently appeared in Yemassee, Hotel Amerika, Pleiades, Salamander, and elsewhere.
Anna Leahy
Anna Leahy is the author of the nonfiction book Tumor and the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter. Her work has appeared at Aeon, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and her essays have won top awards from the Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University, where she edits the international Tab Journal. See more at www.amleahy.com.
Zefyr Lisowski
Zefyr Lisowski is a Southern trans poet and the author of the short poetry collection Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). She’s received support from the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center and elsewhere; her work has appeared in Muzzle, DIAGRAM, Literary Hub, Nat. Brut., and more. Zef’s a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a 2020 Center for the Humanities Incubator Grant for Wolf Inventory, a collaborative film about ghost stories and sexual violence. She lives in Brooklyn and at zeflisowski.com.
Katie Marya
Katie Marya is a poet and translator originally from Atlanta, GA. She earned an MFA from Bennington College and is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 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. Her first full length poetry collection Sugar Work was the Editor’s Choice for the 2020 Alice James Award and will be published in June 2022.
Jhaverchand Meghani
Jhaverchand Meghani (28 August 1896 – 9 March 1947) was a renaissance man: musician, poet, storyteller, translator, editor, writer, and artist. Gandhi called him a “Raashtriya Shaayar” (national poet.) He was also a freedom fighter and social reformer. Having written more than a hundred books, he is a well-known name in the field of Gujarati literature. His most significant contributions are related to Gujarati folk literature. Worried that Gujarat was losing its folklore tradition (because it was passed down orally from generation to generation), he traveled across the state for years, gathering many folktales and ballads into five volumes. Written in a uniquely colorful, colloquial language, they were published as a multi-volume collection titled Saurashtra ni Rasdhar (meaning: The Essence Of Saurashtra.)
Tiffany Midge
Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and was raised by wolves in the Pacific Northwest. She is the recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, the Kenyon Review Earthworks Indigenous Poetry Prize, a Western Heritage Award, the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award, and a Simons Public Humanities fellowship. Tiffany is a former humor columnist for Indian Country Today and the author of Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Rick Moody
Rick Moody, a novelist and short story writer, is the author of the novels The Ice Storm, Purple America, and Hotels of America, among others, and the short story collections Demonology and Right Livelihoods, and the memoir, The Black Veil.
Tomás Q. Morín
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collections Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu, and with Mari L’Esperance co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic, winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Her writing appears in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House. Her book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments is forthcoming with Milkweed. She serves as poetry faculty for the Writing Workshops in Greece and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. She was recently named a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.
Bich Minh Nguyen
Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen is the author of the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the novel Short Girls, and the novel Pioneer Girl. Her work has received an American Book Award and a PEN/Jerard Award, among other honors, and has been featured in numerous anthologies and university and community reads programs. Nguyen is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Dustin Parsons
Dustin Parsons is the author of Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Brevity, and Pleiades, amongst others. He teaches at the University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and their two sons.
Jacob Rogers
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He was a winner of a 2020 PEN/Heim translation grant, and the 2019 Words Without Borders + Poets.org Poems in Translation Contest. His translations have appeared in Asymptote, Epiphany, Best European Fiction 2019, ANMLY, Copper Nickel, PRISM International, Cagibi, Lunch Ticket, Your Impossible Voice, Nashville Review, The Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, and the Portico of Galician Literature, with work forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online.
Erin Elizabeth Smith
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American Review. Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee.
Jade Song
Jade Song is a writer and art director. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, she currently resides in Brooklyn. Find her at jadessong.com.
Noah Stetzer
Noah Stetzer is the author of Because I Can See Needing a Knife (Red Bird Chapbooks). His Pushcart-nominated poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, The Cortland Review, New England Review, and other various journals. He has been a fellow of the Lambda Literary Retreat and a work-study scholar at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Noah lives in Kansas City and can be found online at www.noahstetzer.com.
Ira Sukrungruang
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of three nonfiction books: Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
Sara Moore Wagner
Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, OH with her husband and three small children. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbook Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and Nimrod, among others. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart prize, and Best of the Net. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com.
Lesley Wheeler
Lesley Wheeler’s new books are The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her poems and essays appear in such journals as The Common, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, and Massachusetts Review, and she is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah. She lives in Lexington, Virginia.
