Contributors to Issue XXV

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Alfredo Aguilar

Alfredo Aguilar is the author of On This Side of the Desert, selected by Natalie Diaz for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Frost Place. His work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2017, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.

Lauren K. Alleyne

Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit and Honeyfish, as well as co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and Guernica, among others. Her most recent honors include nominations for a 2020 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the 2020 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Alleyne currently resides in Harrisonburg, VA, where she is a professor of English at James Madison University, and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Get more information about Lauren at www.laurenkalleyne.com and follow her at @poetLKA on social media.

Brandon Amico

Brandon Amico is the author of Disappearing, Inc. (Gold Wake Press, 2019). A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, his poems have appeared in publications including Best American Poetry 2020, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, and The Rumpus.

M.W. Brooke

M.W. Brooke is a queer writer originally from the American Southwest, now living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, and X-R-A-Y. She is on submission with her first novel and hard at work on her second. You can find her at www.mwbrooke.com or @mwbrooke.

Lauren K. Carlson

Lauren K. Carlson is the author of a chapbook Animals I Have Killed. Recent work forthcoming from Salamander Mag, Pirene's Fountain, and LEON Literary Review. Longlisted for the 2021 Paraclete Poetry Prize, she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. For more see www.laurenkcarlson.com.

Lauren Camp

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), Winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry and Distinguished Favorite for the Independent Press Award. Other honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award, and North American Book Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and Poet Lore, and has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian and Arabic.  

Ariel Chu

Ariel Chu is an incoming PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she will be completing a short story collection and novel with the support of a Steinbeck Fellowship. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University in 2020, where she was awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. A former editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal, a 2019 P.D. Soros Fellow, and a 2020-2021 Luce Scholar in Taiwan, Ariel has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best Small Fictions Anthology, and the Best of the Net Award. Ariel’s writing can be found in The Common, The Masters Review, and Sonora Review, among others; most recently, she guest-edited a collection of queer Taiwanese literature with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Visit her at ariel-chu.com.

Ashley Dailey

Ashley Dailey is a poet and multimedia artist from Sargent, Georgia. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholarship, she has been published in Breakwater Review, New Delta Review, Plume Poetry, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

J. David

J. David is a Ukrainian-American geneticist and writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. They serve as editor-in-chief for Flypaper and chief poetry critic for the Cleveland Review of Books. Their debut chapbook, Hibernation Highway, was released from Madhouse Press in 2020. A Baldwin House Fellow and Literary Cleveland Inkubator Fellow, their work has appeared in The Harvard Review, Salt Hill, The Colorado Review, Muzzle Magazine, Passages North, and elsewhere.

Aria Fani

Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington. He was born and raised in Shiraz, Iran, and has lived in California and Mexico since moving to the U.S. in 2004. He got his B.A. in Comparative Literature from San Diego State University and his Ph.D. in Persian Studies at U.C. Berkeley. In addition to research and teaching, Aria engages in social advocacy for asylum seekers and refugees in the U.S.

Noor Habib

Noor Habib is a Teaching Fellow in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and a doctoral candidate in the department of Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst. Her work draws on translation studies, postcolonial theory, and contemporary debates about World Literature; she focuses on regional cosmopolitanism in the Indo-Persian sphere, closely examining the translations, poetry, and prose writing of a group of modern(ist) writers—Miraji, N. M. Rashed, and the Persian writer, Sadeq Hedayat.

Kaely Horton

Kaely Horton’s writing has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Stonecoast Review, Hobart, Pacifica, Citron Review, and others. She received her MFA from the University of New Hampshire and currently lives in Oregon, where she edits, teaches, and spends time in wilderness areas whenever she can. You can find her on Twitter @kaely_horton.

Bijan Jalali

Bijan Jalali was a modern Persian poet. He was born in 1928 in Tehran, where he received his elementary and secondary education. For several years he studied physics at the University of Tehran and natural sciences in Paris and Toulouse. Ultimately, his passion for poetry led him to obtain a bachelor’s degree in French literature from the University of Tehran. Over the course of his professional life until his retirement in 1981, Jalali taught English and French, consulted with the Ministry of Culture’s Museum of Anthropology, and worked for Tehran’s Petrochemical Organization as a translator. In 1999, he passed away in the city of his birth.

Rebecca Lehmann

Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections Ringer, which won the 2018 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019, and Between the Crackups (Salt, 2011). Her poetry has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and other journals, and been featured on The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith and the New York Public Library Poem in Your Pocket program. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Copper Nickel and Pembroke Magazine, reprinted on Longreads, and nominated for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021. She is the Founding Editor of Couplet Poetry, an online journal, and lives in Indiana, where she is an Assistant Professor at Saint Mary’s College. You can find her on Twitter @rebeccalehmann.

Kathleen Loe

Kathleen Loe is a multi-media artist and poet, living in Hudson, NY. Her visual art has been nationally exhibited at galleries in New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, Aspen, and New Orleans as well as at the Jersey City Museum, the Aspen Museum, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Laguna Gloria Museum in Austin, Texas. She has been a visiting critic at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Louisiana State University, and the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in France. Loe has taught both studio and art history on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Bloomfield College. She writes poetry and critical essays for artist exhibitions. Loe served as editor and contributing author for the monograph Alchemy of Light, Mary Conover published by Whale and Star Press, and for the 2021 retrospective exhibition, Robert-Jean Ray: Seasons of Change catalog, published by The Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara California. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review (2021 Pushcart Nominee and nominee for Best New Poets 2021), Cagibi Lit, and Rise Up Review. Learn more at www.kathleenloe.com.

Jessica Kim

Jessica Kim is the 2021-22 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has appeared in Wildness, Diode, F(r)iction, and more. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Lumiere Review and Polyphony Lit. Find her at www.jessicakimwrites.weebly.com, @jessiicable on twitter, or stealing cookies from the cookie jar.

Amy Lyons

Amy Lyons has work in or forthcoming from Prime Number, No Contact, 100 Word Story, Literary Mama, Lunch Ticket, The Independent, and others. Her writing has been recognized and supported by an honorable mention from Miami Book Fair’s 2021 Emerging Writer Fellowship in Fiction, a 2020 Best of the Net nomination, a 2020 Best Small Fictions nomination, a 2019 residency at Millay Colony for the Arts, and a 2019 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship. She’s a Tin House alum and holds an MFA from Bennington. She lives in New York City. 

Zara Khadeeja Majoka

Zara Khadeeja Majoka is doing a PhD in Religion at Columbia. She studies the past and present of wandering antinomian mystics in Islam. In her spare time she wanders, thinks of poetry, translates poetry, and photographs the fleeting, magical oddities of New York City.

Fatima Malik

Fatima Malik (she/her) is a fundraiser and poet with work in Chestnut Review, Door is a Jar, diode poetry journal, The Georgia Review, The Margins, and others. She is working on her first full-length collection of poems, an excavation of grief after her father’s sudden death. She has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and a joint MA in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies from New York University. While she currently lives in New York City, her heart is forever in Lahore. Find her on Twitter @FaZeMalik.

Tom McAllister

Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower’s Handbook, as well as the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. He is the co-host of the weekly podcast, Book Fight!, and nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse. He teaches at Temple University and lives in New Jersey. He is on Twitter at @t_mcallister.

Carly Joy Miller

Carly Joy Miller is the author of Ceremonial (Orison Books, 2018), selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2017 Orison Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Like a Beast (Anhinga Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Rick Campbell Prize.

Mīrajī

Sanā’ullah Dār, better known by his penname Mīrajī (1912-1949) is one of the founders of modern Urdu poetry. He began his career as poetry editor for the literary magazine Adabī Dunīyā [Literary World] and made his mark in the Urdu literary world through his work as poet, translator, editor and mentor to younger poets. Miraji died in 1949 at the young age of 37, and left behind a wide and varied corpus of more than a thousand poems in different genres, including naz̤m [lyric poetry] gīt [folk song], ġhazal [mono-rhymed lyric poem] and hazal [nonsense/obscene verse].

Sara Lupita Olivares

Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of Migratory Sound (The University of Arkansas Press), which was selected as winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Bennington Review, Salt Hill Journal, Image Journal, and elsewhere. She currently lives in northern New Mexico where she is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.

William Olsen

William Olsen is the author of Sand Theory and TechnoRage (Triquartely/Northwestern). His work has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Breadloaf. He lives in Kalamazoo.

Gladwell Pamba

Gladwell Pamba lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya. She has previously been longlisted for the African Writivism Short Story Prize and won AFREADA Contest. Her short stories are anthologized and her other works appear in The Offing, Kalahari Review, Kikwetu Journal, Patchwork Lit Magazine and the upcoming issue of Tint Journal.  Gladwell blogs at chingano.com and tweets from @GladwellPamba.

Paul Rousseau

Paul Rousseau is a disabled writer from Minnesota. His work has appeared in Roxane Gay's The Audacity, Catapult, X-R-A-Y, Hippocampus, Rejection Letters, JMWW, Okay Donkey, and Wigleaf. You can follow him on Twitter  @PaulWrites7.

Krupa Shandilya

Krupa Shandilya is Associate Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College, with an affiliate appointment in English. She is the author of the monograph Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth Century South Asian Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and has also translated Urdu poetry and prose. Her scholarly interests include South Asian and postcolonial literature, Bombay cinema, women’s fiction, and feminist theory.

Grace Q. Song

Grace Q. Song is a Chinese-American writer residing in New York. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, PANK, The Journal, and elsewhere. Recent works were included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. She tweets @grasoceng. 

Adeeba Shahid Talukder

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, translator, and singer. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her debut collection, Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and an Emerging Poets fellowship from Poets House.

Weinong Teng

Weinong Teng (鄧維襛) is a poet moonlighting as a law student. They live in San Francisco with their family of house plants.

John Sibley Williams

John Sibley Williams is the author of seven poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.