Contributors to Issue XXIII
Stine Su Yon An
Stine Su Yon An (안수연) is a poet, translator, and performer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. You can find her online at gregorspamsa.com.
Anne Barngrover
Anne Barngrover's most recent poetry collection, Brazen Creature, was published with The University of Akron Press in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Award for Poetry. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the low-residency MA program in Creative Writing, and lives in Tampa, Florida.
Despy Boutris
Despy Boutris’s work has been published in Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston and serves as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast and The West Review.
Lyn Li Che
Lyn Li Che is from Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are upcoming in River Styx, Indiana Review, BOAAT, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. She currently lives in New York City, where she works in tech strategy.
Jia Dao
Jia Dao (779-843) spent time as a Buddhist monk before becoming a disciple of the Tang poet, Han Yu. Jia Dao failed several attempts to pass the official exams and lived a life of poverty. His poetry is spare, elegant, and reflected his early Buddhist training.
Shira Dentz
Shira Dentz is the author of five books including SISYPHUSINA (PANK, 2020), and two chapbooks. Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, New American Writing, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, Brooklyn Rail, OmniVerse, Idaho Review, Plume, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series, and NPR. Interviews with her about her writing have also appeared in journals such as Rain Taxi, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. She’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award. Currently, she is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and lives in upstate New York.
Joanne Diaz
Joanne Diaz is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is the author of My Favorite Tyrants (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press, 2011), and with Ian Morris, she is the co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She teaches in the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Anna Foran
Anna Foran is a writer and visual artist based in Toronto. Recently, her prose chapbook DAYCARE was named a finalist in the Fall 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition and the Fall 2020 Adrift Chapbook Contest. This story was inspired by one passed on by her grandmother.
Mike Good
Mike Good lives in Pittsburgh and serves as managing editor at Autumn House Press. Some of his recent poetry and book reviews can be found in or are forthcoming at december, Five Points, Full Stop, Ploughshares, Salamander, Spillway, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere, in addition to anthologies such as The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook (Belt Publishing). His work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and The Sun, and he holds an MFA from Hollins University. Find more at mikegoodwrites.wordpress.com.
Rebecca Ruth Gould
Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of Writers & Rebels (2016) and Cityscapes (2019). She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian. Her latest translation with her co-translator Kayvan Tahmasebian is High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019).
Lia Greenwell
Lia Greenwell is an essayist and poet currently at work on a book of nonfiction about fear, safety, addiction, compassion, and punishment in the aftermath of a carjacking. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Missouri Review, and the Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and has received scholarships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Lia has taught creative writing to high school and college students through the Girls Write Now program in New York City and as the Joan Beebe Graduate Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College. Raised in rural Michigan, she now lives in Metro Detroit.
Sara J. Grossman
Sara J. Grossman’s poems and essays have been published in Verse Daily, Guernica, BOAAT, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her first book of poems, Let the House of Body Fall, was published by New Issues Poetry & Prose in October 2018. She is a poet and Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Bryn Mawr College and has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, The MacDowell Colony, and Hedgebrook.
Yoo Heekyung
Yoo Heekyung [유희경] is a South Korean poet and playwright. He is the author of the poetry collections 오늘 아침 단어 [oneul achim daneo] (2011, Moonji Books), 당신의 자리 - 나무로 자라는 방법 [dangsinui jari - namuro jaraneun bangbeop] (2013, achimdalbooks), and 우리에게 잠시 신이었던 [uriege jamsi sinieotdeon] (2018, Moonji Books). He is active as a playwright with the theater company 독 [dock] and as a member of the poetry collective 작란 (作亂) [jaknan]. In 2019, Yoo was awarded the 현대문학상 [Hyundae Munhak Sang] (Contemporary Literature Award) for his poetry. He runs wit n cynical, a series of poetry bookstores and project spaces in Seoul.
Carlie Hoffman
Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). Her second collection is also forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. Her honors include a 92Y/Discovery Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. Carlie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Purchase College, SUNY.
Jill Kolongowski
Jill Kolongowski is a nonfiction writer and professor living in Northern California. She is the author of the collection of essays Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me (Ulysses Press, 2017), and other essays are published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. She is at work on a new essay collection about disaster. Find her tweeting about tornadoes @jillkolongowski.
Keith Leonard
Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Mainer/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Believer.
Mingpei Li
Mingpei Li was born in China and lives in New York City. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Cherry Tree, The Massachusetts Review, and Muzzle Magazine; and her fiction recently appeared in Hobart. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for Best New Poets. Find her on Twitter @biaryl.
Éireann Lorsung
Éireann Lorsung lives not far from the Atlantic Ocean, in a small apartment in a small city, where she makes pictures, books, and clothes, and spends time thinking about literature and art in the company of others. Milkweed Editions published Music for Landing Planes By, her book, and The Century; you can find out more at ohbara.com.
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was a Jewish, German-language poet from Czernowitz, a city in Bukovina. On December 16, 1942, she died of typhus in the Nazi SS labor camp Michailowka in Ukraine. She was eighteen years old. Selma is the author of Blütenlese, a collection of poems that, with the dedication and care of her contemporaries, miraculously survived the war.
Aria Pahari
Aria Pahari is a poet from Virginia currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Arizona. Her work can be found in Kajal Magazine, AZE Journal, Homology Lit, and POST Journal. She adores novels and birds.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/her) is a queer, disabled, Colombian/Latinx poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) won the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. A Spring 2021 Mellon Arts and Practitioners Fellow at the Yale University Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, a 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA Alum, her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, and Foglifter, among other places. Born in Arizona and raised in California, she currently lives in Cleveland. heidiandrea.com; @vessels.we.are on Instagram.
Monica Rico
Monica Rico is a Mexican American CantoMundo Fellow, Macondista, and Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award winner who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and works for the Bear River Writers’ Conference. She has received grants from the Good Hart Artist Residency and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, Sporklet 12, The Breakbeat Poets Vol.4, LatiNext, Anomaly, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, BOAAT, and Split this Rock.
Jennifer Lorene Ritenour
Jennifer Lorene Ritenour is from San Pedro and lived in Las Vegas. Her writing is informed by place. Her style has been described as dirty fabulism. Her work has appeared in the Santa Monica Review and The Writing Disorder, among other places. For more information visit linktr.ee/writershearth20.
Anuel Rodriguez
Anuel Rodriguez is a Mexican-American poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, PANK, decomP, Blackbird, and elsewhere.
Kimberly Rooney
Kimberly Rooney (高小荣) is a Chinese-American adoptee from Jiangsu Province. They now live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and their writing has appeared in The Offing, Jellyfish Review, and Pittsburgh Magazine. When they aren't writing or working, they enjoy cooking, singing, and crocheting.
Padraig Rooney
Padraig Rooney’s The Gilded Chalet: Off-piste in Literary Switzerland was described in the TLS as “Brilliant. Thoroughly absorbing.” He has published three books of poetry and a bilingual selection appeared from Wolfbach (Zurich) titled Angelandet / Landing Craft in 2017. Nearly finished writing a biography of the Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, he lives in Basel, Switzerland. padraigrooney.com
Johnny Salas
Johnny Salas is a photographer based in Arizona. His photobook documenting the Phoenix independent wrestling scene, Nothing Means Nothing, was published by Tolsun Books in 2019. You can find more of his stuff at butcantheyfight.com.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–1942) was a Swiss writer, reporter and photographer who travelled in the United States during 1936–37 and again in 1940–41. She wrote about New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Knoxville, the Tennessee Mountains, and Alabama on topics ranging from Roosevelt’s New Deal, race relations in the South, labor unrest and such figures as Myles Horton, Carson McCullers, and Dorothy Thompson. Schwarzenbach’s work was originally published as German feuilleton in Swiss newspapers and magazines, together with her photographs, and has since been collected in book form in German and French but not so far in English. Her fiction and travel writing, Death in Persia, All the Roads Are Open and Lyric Novella, has been published by Seagull Books.
Schwarzenbach came from a wealthy background of Swiss silk industrialists and military leaders, and as a spirited lesbian writer she struggled to escape the strictures of family. She lived in Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s and became friends with Erika and Klaus Mann. Like them, she frequented the circle of German exiles in Paris, the South of France and New York following the shift to National Socialism in Germany in 1933. She was a traveler — to the Balkans, Russia, Persia, Afghanistan, the Belgian Congo — and very much a restless soul, multi-talented and often unhappy. For much of her adult life Schwarzenbach was addicted to morphine and this led her to a period of hospitalization in a private clinic in White Plains, New York, in January 1941. She was released on condition that she leave the United States. She died in 1942, following injuries sustained in a bicycle accident. Her life and work — travel writing, novels, photographs, journalism — was rediscovered in the 1980s by a new generation of liberated lesbians, and has since garnered fresh attention. In June 2020 the Paul Klee Center in Bern is showcasing a selection of her photographs.
Martha Shaffer
Martha Shaffer is a graduate of the South Carolina Governor‘s School for the Arts and Humanities, where she concentrated in creative writing. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review and Gettysburg Review. She will attend Sewanee: University of the South in Fall 2021.
Reena Shah
Reena Shah is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, BBC, The American Prospect, National Geographic, The Guardian, Third Coast, Writer’s Digest, The Texas Review, among others. She is a Tin House Scholar, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellow, and a Cuttyhunk Island Residency Fellow. She is also the winner of the 2019 Third Coast Fiction Prize and the 2019 Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Award. For many years she was a member of the Parul Shah Dance Company. She is currently teaching third graders and at work on a novel-in-stories. You can reach her at reenadshah.com and on twitter @reenashah.
Josh Shepard
Josh Shepard is a poet and artist living in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma. A writer of poems, flash fiction, screenplays, and more, his work can be found on the screen, the page, or the stage — most recently in New Plains Review.
Vivien Song
Vivien Song is a high school senior from the Bay Area. A 2020 National YoungArts Finalist in Poetry, her work appears or is forthcoming in Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins, Cosmonauts Avenue, and mineral lit mag, among others. Vivien likes long, aimless walks and overnight oats.
Star Su
Star Su grew up in Ann Arbor and is currently an undergraduate at Brown. Her work is published or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Star 82 Review, and elsewhere.
Kayvan Tahmasebian
Kayvan Tahmasebian is a poet, translator, literary critic, and the author of Isfahan’s Mold (2016) and Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (2019). His poetry has appeared in Notre Dame Review, the Hawai’i Review, Salt Hill, and Lunch Ticket, where it was a finalist for The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts in 2017. With Rebecca Ruth Gould, he is co-translator of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019).
Vanni Thach
Vanni Thach was born in Cao Lanh, Vietnam. Raised in Camden, NJ. Received a BA from Bates College, Lewiston, ME. Graduated from McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA, with an MA in Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. Recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship (Prose). Working to finish, revise, and edit a novel.
Eric Tran
Eric Tran is queer Vietnamese writer and a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC, where he is also an associate editor at Orison Books. His debut book of poems, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, won the Autumn House Press Emerging Writer’s contest. He is also the author of the chapbooks Revisions and Affairs with Men in Suits. His work has been featured in Poetry Daily and Best of the Net and appears in Pleiades, Iowa Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.
Yanwen Xu
Yanwen Xu was born in Xuzhou, China. He now studies and writes at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Gary Young
Gary Young is the author of several collections of poetry. His most recent books are That’s What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; The Dream of a Moral Life which won the James D. Phelan Award; and Hands. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.
Nima Yushij
Nima Yushij (1897–1960) was the father of Persian modernism, famous for introducing the sheʿr-e now (new poetry) style of poetry to modern Persian literature. Nima challenged the classical inflexible abstract forms and structures of classical Persian poetry by his objective descriptions and symbolist narrative poems. Nearly all currents of modernist Persian poetry have defined themselves in terms of the new poetics Nima developed in his Harf-hā-ye hamsāyeh (Neighbor’s words), his letters and diaries. His poems are collected in Majmūeh ashʿār-i Nīmā Yūshīj (edited by Sirus Tahbaz, 1991; edited by Sharagim Yushij, 2018).
Liu Yuxi
Liu Yuxi (772-842) grew up in southern China, after his family was forced to move there to escape the An Lushan Rebellion. He held a number government positions, though he was periodically banished for writing political poems critical of the court. He was close to many other Tang poets, in particular Li Yi and Han Yu, who remained lifelong friends.
Xueyi Zhou
Xueyi Zhou is an emerging writer in mainland China. A native Chinese, she enjoys the challenge of writing in English, a language out of her parents’ reach. More importantly, she enjoys the eye-rolling of her family when they demand to know but can’t. She currently works full-time in a stainless-steel company in Foshan. She is on Facebook.
