Contributors to Issue XXIV

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Dunni Abisayo

Dunni Abisayo is a queer Nigerian writer who grew up in London. She is studying English and African American Studies at Georgetown University, where she is also a 2020-21 Lannan Fellow. She was a recipient of the 2020 Singing Bullet Poetry Scholarship, shortlisted for the Bad Form Review 2020 Writers’ Prize and longlisted for the Women Poets’ Prize 2020 and the London Writers Award 2021. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AFREADA Magazine and YES Poetry. 

Kemi Alabi

Kemi Alabi is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Their work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Boston Review, Guernica, Best New Poets, and several other journals and anthologies. A teaching artist and cultural strategist, Alabi is coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021) and lives in Chicago, IL. Find more at kemialabi.com.

K.B. Carle

K.B. Carle lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the Associate Editor at Fractured Lit. and Editor at FlashBack Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Passages North, Porcupine Literary, Apiary Magazine, Jellyfish Review, The Offing, and have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. She can be found online at kbcarle.com or on Twitter @kbcarle.

Nancy Naomi Carlson

Nancy Naomi Carlson, translator, poet, and essayist, has authored eleven titles (seven translated), including Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull Books, 2021). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019), her second full-length poetry collection, was named “New & Noteworthy” by The New York Times. A recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, she was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Poetry Award. Decorated by the Order of the French Academic Palms, she has earned two doctorates and is a professor of graduate counseling at Walden University.

Vanessa Chan

Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer. She has writing published or forthcoming in Conjunctions, Electric Lit, Ecotone, BOMB Magazine, Best Small Fictions, and more. She’s a fiction editor at TriQuarterly, and her work has been supported by Sewanee, Tin House, and Disquiet International. She is at work on a novel and a story collection. You can find her at www.vanessajchan.com or @vanjchan.

Richard Cole

Richard Cole is the author of two books of poetry: The Glass Children (The University of Georgia Press) and Success Stories (Limestone Books). He is also the author of a memoir, Catholic by Choice (Loyola Press). His poems and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Rattle, Hudson Review, Sun Magazine, Barrow Street, Diode, The American Journal of Poetry, Ruminate, Dappled Things, Image Journal, and a number of anthologies. Honors include an NEA fellowship and a Bush Foundation grant. Cole works as a painter and business writer in Austin, Texas. More at www.richard-cole.net.

Sarah-Jane Crowson

Sarah-Jane’s poetry and visual poetry can be found in a variety of online and print journals and has been shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award and the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year Award. Sarah-Jane’s work is inspired by fairytales, psychogeography and surrealism. She uses bricolage to investigate the unusual and surprising; exploring the space between real and imagined. Her poetry uses old images and text and re-imagines these to create alternative narratives. As well as working as an educator at Hereford College of Arts, a small arts college in the UK, Sarah-Jane is a postgraduate researcher at Birmingham City University, investigating ideas of the critical radical rural. You can find her on Twitter @Sarahjfc.

Steven Espada Dawson

Steven Espada Dawson is a writer from East Los Angeles, now working out of Austin, Texas. The son of a Mexican immigrant, his poems appear/appear soon in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2020, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, and Split Lip Magazine, among other journals.

Kate Deimling

Kate Deimling is a translator, poet, and fiction writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her poems appear in recent issues of Grey Sparrow Journal, Wrongdoing Magazine, and Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and she is a poetry reader for Bracken. She has translated six books from French on topics ranging from Renaissance art to the wine industry. This is her first published fiction.

Brian Komei Dempster

Brian Komei Dempster’s debut book of poems, Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), received the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry. His second poetry collection, Seize (Four Way Books, 2020), was Silver Winner of a 2021 Human Relations Indie Book Award and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award, Julie Suk Award, and National Indie Excellence Award in Poetry. Dempster is editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). He is a professor of rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as Director of Administration for the Master’s in Asia Pacific Studies program.

Alex DiFrancesco

Alex DiFrancesco is the author of Pscyhopomps, All City, and the forthcoming short story collection Transmutation. They live in Cleveland, Ohio, and ride a pink Vespa.

Mónica Gomery

Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi, raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now living on Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. She is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poetry has won the 2020 Minola Review Poetry Contest, and has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She was a finalist in the 2020 Newfound Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. Her poems can be found most recently as a Poetry Foundation Poem of The Day, and forthcoming in Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, So To Speak, and The Journal. Read more at www.monicagomerywriting.com.

Carolina Hospital

Carolina Hospital is the author of the poetry collections, Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press), The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press); and Myth America, a collaboration with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina, (Anhinga Press); as well as the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books); and No Excuses! A Brief Survival Guide to Freshman Composition (Sonoran Desert Books). She edited Los Atrevidos: Cuban American Writers (Linden Lane Press) and A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press), both seminal works in introducing the literature of Cuban Americans. Her work has appeared in numerous national publications, such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; Bedford/St. Martin’s Florida Literature, and Longman’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.

J. Bailey Hutchinson

J. Bailey Hutchinson is a poet from Memphis, Tennessee. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where she served as Assistant Director of the Open Mouth Literary Center. She is an associate editor at Milkweed Editions, and her work can be found in Muzzle Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, and more. A complete list of her work can be found at jbaileyhutchinson.com.

Jill McCabe Johnson

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry books Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown, and Diary of the One Swelling Sea, and the chapbooks Borderlines and Pendulum. Honors include an Academy of American Poets prize, Paula Jones Gardiner Poetry Award, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and Hedgebrook. Jill is Editor-in-Chief of Wandering Aengus Press and teaches Creative Writing for Skagit Valley College where she lives in the San Juan Islands on traditional Lahq’temish (Lummi) land.

Alex Juarez

Alex Juarez is a Chicanx lesbian writer, editor, and pop culture enthusiast from Los Angeles. A recent graduate of the BFA Writing Program at Pratt Institute, they have work in the SFWP Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Lit, and more. Find them on twitter @alexbethjuarez

Kasey Jueds

Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket, forthcoming in fall 2021. Her work can be found in journals including American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Narrative, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Pleiades. She lives in the mountains of New York State with one human, a spotted dog, and many houseplants. “Kittatinny” is copyrighted by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, graphic artist and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her recent essays about the pandemic, life, and art have appeared in Guernica, The Sewanee Review, Entropy, Blackbird, Brevity, Five Points, and the New England Review. You can read her graphic narratives and illustrated essays at The Quarantine Public Library and On the Seawall. She tweets a daily sketch @JesseLKercheval and is on Instagram as jlkerche.

Emily Lu

Emily Lu is a poet and resident physician in psychiatry. Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press 2019) was shortlisted for the bpNichol chapbook award..

Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou is a prize-winning, world-famous novelist, poet, and essayist from what is now considered Congo-Brazzaville. His many accolades include the Prix de la Société des Poètes Français and the prestigious Grand Prix de la Littérature from the Académie Française. Twice a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, his prose has been translated into close to twenty languages, including Catalan, English, Hebrew, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. The Guardian described him as “one of Africa’s greatest writers.” Mabanckou is a professor at the University of California — Los Angeles, and is a frequent guest on radio and TV shows in France and around the globe.

Nandita Naik

Nandita Naik is a sophomore at Stanford who loves creative writing and programming. Her writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the Poetry Society of the UK.

Sebastián Hasani Páramo

Sebastián Hasani Páramo is a CantoMundo Fellow. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, New South, New England Review, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, among others. He is the founding editor of THE BOILER and Poetry Editor for Deep Vellum. He holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of North Texas. He was a 2020 Dobie Paisano Fellow sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters.

Nome Emeka Patrick

Nome Emeka Patrick is a blxck bxy; he graduated from University of Benin, Nigeria, where he studied English Language and Literature. His works have been published or forthcoming in POETRY, Poet Lore, Strange Horizons, Black Warrior Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The FIDDLEHEAD, Notre Dame Review, Puerto Del Sol, McNeese Review, FLAPPER HOUSE, Gargouille, Crannóg Magazine, Mud Season Review, The Oakland Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart prize nominee, his manuscript We Need New Moses. Or New Luther King was a finalist for the 2018 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria. Say Hi on Twitter @paht_rihk.

Ricky Ray

Ricky Ray is a disabled poet, critic, essayist and the founding editor of Rascal: A Journal of Ecology, Literature and Art. He is the author of Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books, 2020), The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020), and Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019). He was educated at Columbia University and Bennington College, and lives in the old green hills with his old brown dog, Addie, where they discover poetry by pressing their ears to the lips of the Earth.

Dean Rader

Dean Rader has written, edited, or co-edited eleven books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements & Alexandra Teague, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Recent work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, BOMB, Ploughshares, Poetry Review (UK), and Best of the Net. His work has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the Headlands Center for the Arts and the MacDowell Foundation. In 2019, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and this year, he was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of two poetry collections: The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons (Acre Books-Cincinnati Review 2020), a Rumpus Book Club pick and one of Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2020; and Chord Box (U of Arkansas Press, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poems appear in POETRY, Boston Review, The Missouri Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FIELD, Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction can be found in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Travel Writing, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and other journals. A former Kenyon Review Fellow, she will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College in 2021-2022.

G. J. Sanford

G. J. Sanford is a queer poet and writer birthed and corrupted in Nevada’s high desert. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and magazines such as Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, Frontier Poetry, december, Salt Hill, River Styx, and others. They are, with writer Logan Seidl, co-editor of the Vitni Review.

Jen Soong

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Jen Soong grew up in a small town in New Jersey and has been on the hunt for extraordinary stories for as long as she can remember. An alum of VONA, her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, GAY MAG, Manifest-Station, Entropy, and Jellyfish Review. She is currently working towards her MFA in creative writing at UC Davis. Her memoir-in-progress is about family ties, depression, and the silences we learn to break. Find her work at jensoong.com.

Norma Liliana Valdez

Norma Liliana Valdez is the author of the chapbook Preparing the Body (YesYes Books, 2019). A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and a CantoMundo fellow, her work appears in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, PANK Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the anthology Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA, among others. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Extension Writing Program and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, Under the Volcano International, and Community of Writers. She lives in the Bay Area.

Hananah Zaheer

Hananah’s recent writing has appeared in AGNI, Smokelong, Pithead Chapel, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. A flash chapbook, Lovebirds, is forthcoming from Bull City Press. She is currently working on a novel.